David S. Golub is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School and is a partner in Silver Golub & Teitell LLP, which he helped found in 1978. Throughout his nearly 50-year legal career, he has sought to utilize the law to further a commitment to constitutional and civil rights and protection of the disadvantaged in a trial and appellate practice encompassing virtually every aspect of litigation. He is currently the head of the firm’s Class Action & Complex Litigation Practice.
Throughout his career, Mr. Golub has devoted a substantial portion of his practice to constitutional, civil rights and other pro bono matters. Although a lifelong Democrat, he successfully represented the Connecticut Republican Party in a voting rights case in the United States Supreme Court, establishing the right of a political party, rather than the State, to determine who may vote in a party’s primaries. He has represented The New York Times and Times Mirror Corporation in First Amendment litigation, one of Connecticut’s senators in a case involving the constitutional rights of the mentally retarded and Connecticut’s Chief State’s Attorney in civil rights litigation. Mr. Golub has represented the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and other state and national civil rights organizations and parties in constitutional litigation, appearing on behalf of such organizations in amicus roles in litigation involving diverse issues such as discrimination in education, the rights of mother and child and state death penalty litigation. Mr. Golub has argued twice before the United States Supreme Court, more than 40 appeals in the federal courts of appeal and on numerous occasions in Connecticut’s appellate courts. He has litigated cases in state and federal courts across the country.
Mr. Golub served as lead private counsel for the State of Connecticut in its sovereign enforcement action against the tobacco industry and participated in the nationwide litigation leading up to the national settlement that resulted in a $3.6 billion recovery for the State of Connecticut. Connecticut’s leading role in the nationwide litigation was specifically recognized by a special panel of former attorneys general, which concluded that the contribution of Connecticut’s legal team to the national settlement was among the top five of the 57 states and other entities involved in that litigation. As a result of that finding, the State received a special award of an additional $370 million of the national settlement proceeds.
Mr. Golub has also maintained an active trial practice for individual plaintiffs. He obtained the first plaintiff’s verdict for an injured smoker ever rendered in New England, winning a judgment ultimately totaling (with interest) more than $52 million after lengthy trial and appeal proceedings. The verdict was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and, in related proceedings, by the Connecticut Supreme Court, establishing the standards for recovery against cigarettes companies under Connecticut product liability law. He successfully represented a news anchorwoman in a highly publicized gender discrimination and retaliation trial against the Post-Newsweek Company, obtaining an $8 million verdict for her. He won a $10 million verdict for an executive in a wrongful termination lawsuit against Exxon Corporation in one of the first cases to use tort remedies in employment litigation and secured a $4 million judgment for a former employee of IBM as a result of a private security firm’s wrongful invasion of his privacy. Mr. Golub represented Ernie Cobb, a former basketball star at Boston College who was accused of point shaving in a highly-publicized case involving Henry Hill of “Goodfellas” fame. Mr. Cobb was acquitted after a jury trial in federal court in Brooklyn.
A long-time opponent of the death penalty, Mr. Golub helped overturn the death penalty in two pro bono cases in Florida cases. He was appointed to serve as lead counsel on behalf of Connecticut’s death row inmates challenging the discriminatory application of Connecticut’s death penalty laws in a special proceeding authorized by the Connecticut Supreme Court. The peer-reviewed study of the administration of capital punishment in Connecticut developed in the case was cited by the Connecticut Supreme Court in its 2015 decision declaring Connecticut’s death penalty statutes unconstitutional.
Prior to entering private practice, Mr. Golub taught clinical trial practice at the University of Connecticut School of Law for two years and, after leaving the UConn faculty, taught trial practice at Yale Law School for a number of years on an adjunct basis. He has been an invited speaker before Connecticut and national legal associations and lay groups. Mr. Golub has received the National Legal Aid and Defender Association’s annual award for outstanding volunteer contributions by a private attorney to legal assistance for the poor. He has been recognized as a “lawyer who makes a difference” for his work in tobacco litigation. He is a recipient of the Paul J. McQuillan Public Service Award from the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association for his work in helping to abolish the death penalty in Connecticut. He has been recognized in numerous categories in Best Lawyers in America since its inception in 1984 and as one of the top attorneys in Connecticut and New England by Super Lawyers, which featured him on the cover of Connecticut Super Lawyers in 2007. In 2015, he received The Connecticut Law Tribune’s “Professional Excellence Award,” honoring his distinguished legal career, and in 2016 he received the “Learned Hand Award” from the American Jewish Committee for the excellence of his legal work and contributions to the community.
Mr. Golub is currently serving as lead counsel for Connecticut’s public employee unions and their employees in ground-breaking First Amendment class litigation barring a state from ordering mass layoffs of union employees to coerce collective bargaining concessions. In that litigation, the unions and more than 40,000 union employees have recovered nearly $250 million dollars in lost wages and pension benefits and other awards. Mr. Golub helped the United States government recover $150 million in a whistleblower action against a major defense contractor, then the largest amount ever recovered under the federal False Claims Act. He was lead counsel for 70 Connecticut municipalities seeking recovery of money lost because of the Enron scandal, winning a $35+ million judgment after trial, then the largest amount ever awarded against a public entity in Connecticut. Mr. Golub also served as lead counsel in a class action against Xerox Corporation for violation of ERISA pension laws, obtaining a settlement providing increased pension benefits to approximately 40,000 present and former Xerox employees in what was then the largest class action in Connecticut history. He was also on a team of Class counsel that obtained a $75 million recovery against The Hartford on behalf of structured settlement annuitants denied full annuity policy benefits, and he was counsel for the Town of Fairfield, CT, pension funds in litigation that enabled the Town to recover its $15 million losses from investments with Bernard Madoff.
In 2020, he joined on a team of class counsel in emergency class action litigation against the Federal Bureau of Prisons that produced a settlement providing crucial COVID protections to inmate at FCI Danbury.