Judith Resnik

Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School

Professor Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches courses on federalism, procedure, courts, prisons, equality, and citizenship. Her scholarship focuses on the relationship between democratic values of egalitarian participation and the provision of government services; the role of collective redress and class actions; contemporary conflicts over privatization; the relationships of states to citizens and noncitizens; the interaction among federal, state, and tribal courts; practices of punishment and the history of incarceration; and equality and gender. 

Resnik is the founding director of Yale’s Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law. An author of books, articles, and monographs (including Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms and Federal Courts Stories), she received a two-year Andrew Carnegie Fellowship for research on her book, Impermissible Punishments. Forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, the book explores the trans-Atlantic development and infrastructure of a profession of “corrections;” the shaping of “standards” for the “treatment of prisoners;” the impact of World War II, the Holocaust, and the U.S. the civil rights revolution in enabling prisoners some success in gaining recognition of limits on the kinds of punishments government can, in a polity claiming to be committed to the equal status of its members, impose on individuals convicted of crimes; and the challenges of materializing that status in the face of claimed “security” needs. 

Resnik is also an occasional litigator and, in 2018, Resnik was awarded an honorary doctorate from University College of London. She has chaired the Association of American Law Schools’ Sections on Federal Courts, Procedure, and Women in Legal Education, and she is a member of the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.