About

Jim Davy is the founder of All Rise Trial & Appellate, where he advises individuals and organizations on trial and appellate strategy covering a wide range of issues affecting the rights and interests of marginalized people. In addition to numerous prisoners, pretrial detainees, detained immigrants, and other people caught up in the criminal justice system, Jim has represented organizations like the ACLU, the National Police Accountability Project, Public Justice, the National Women’s Law Center, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Upturn, the Juvenile Law Center, United Academics of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Bail Fund, and the National Employment Law Project. He regularly collaborates with public interest organizations and law firms to litigate high-leverage impact cases in federal courts across the country, and is a member of the National Police Accountability Project.

Among other victories, Jim has:

  • dispatched an interlocutory appeal of a denial of qualified immunity, rejecting much of the officer’s challenge as fact-based an inappropriate for appellate review, see Rush v. City of Philadelphia; Officer Richard Nicoletti, 78 F.4th 610 (3d Cir. 2023);

  • co-counseled a successful petition to the en banc Ninth Circuit, resulting in an opinion holding that universities can control off-campus contexts for Title IX purposes, see Brown v. State of Arizona, 82 F.4th 863 (9th Cir. 2023) (en banc);

  • won the first appellate opinion holding that schools can be liable under Title IX for deliberate indifference to sex-based harassment by non-student guests, see Hall v. Millersville, 22 F.4th 397 (3d Cir. 2022);

  • exempted several categories of claims from PLRA exhaustion based on the plain text of a state grievance policy, see Miles v. Anton, 42 F.4th 777 (7th Cir. 2022);

  • clarified state liability for dry-celling prisoners, see Thomas v. Tice, 948 F.3d 133 (3d Cir. 2020);

  • expanded due process rights for detained immigrants, see E.D. v. Sharkey, 928 F.3d 299 (3d Cir. 2019);

  • succeeded in demonstrating that the PLRA provides for reinstatement of an underlying action in the event that prison defendants breach a settlement agreement, see Sanchez v. Klemm, No. 22-3171, __ WL __ (3d Cir. 2024);

  • defeated an interlocutory appeal of a denial of qualified immunity on excessive force and false arrest claims, see Martin v. Miami Dade Cnty., No. 23-10841, 2024 WL 1434329 (11th Cir. 2024);

  • prevailed on a petition for habeas corpus for an incarcerated person who never got a direct appeal, see Ross v. Bush, No. 19-3947, 2022 WL 2816797 (3d Cir. 2022);

  • confirmed that a prison’s denial of treatment for hepatitis C can state a civil rights claim, see Johnson v. Peterson, 847 F. App’x 343 (6th Cir. 2021);

  • prompted the Commonwealth Court to hold that the Pa. Dep’t of Labor & Industry’s practice of failing to transmit unemployment claimants’ full records to hearing referees violates due process, see Kozicki v. UCBR, 299 A.3d 1055 (Pa. Commw. Ct. 2023);

  • helped make autopsy records of in-custody deaths available to academic researchers, see Coroner v. Keel, No. 242 C.D. 2023, __ WL __ (Pa. Commw. Ct. Dec. 7, 2023);

  • won release for a formerly life-sentenced man in a compassionate release petition with novel legal theories, see United States v. Marshall, 604 F.Supp.3d 277 (E.D. Pa. 2022);

  • improved family visitation at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, see Woods v. Marler, No. 17-cv-4443 (E.D. Pa. 2018); and

  • secured the largest settlement the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has ever paid to settle a claim that its employees failed to protect a prisoner from sexual assault.

His amicus briefs have also been cited by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in opinions declining to implement risk assessment algorithms during bail reform, see Philadelphia Community Bail Fund v. First Judicial District; in rejecting Uber’s argument that its drivers are self-employed small business owners, see Lowman v. Unemployment Compensation Board of Review; and in ordering release of a juvenile wrongly transferred to adult court, see Commonwealth v. Taylor.  

Previously, Jim has been a law fellow at the nation’s largest labor union, and a staff attorney at state and national non-profit civil rights organizations, where he litigated individual and class action cases against the Trump Justice Department, the Parish Attorneys and Sheriffs of Louisiana, and numerous prisons and other correctional facilities. He clerked for the Hon. L. Felipe Restrepo of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and graduated cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was a Public Interest Law Scholar and was an editor of the Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law & Policy. 

Jim is admitted to practice in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Eleventh, D.C. and Federal Circuits; in the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern, Middle, and Western Districts of Pennsylvania and the District of the District of Columbia; and at the U.S. Supreme Court.