Judith Resnik 
Founding Director / Arthur Liman Professor of Law [full bio]
Law School Room M43
203-432-1447
judith.resnik@yale.edu

Judith led the Liman Center at its inception in 1997. During this past year, she has continued to work on her book, Impermissible Punishments, supported by a 2018-2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Much of this year was also focused on aiming to alleviate some of the harms of COVID for people in detention. In the spring of 2020, Bloomberg News ran her op-ed, Protecting Prisoners in Pandemics Is a Constitutional Must, and she submitted a declaration in several jurisdictions about the availability of provisional remedies for judges responding to COVID litigation. One of her articles, Preclusion and Inaccessible Arbitration: Data, Non-Disclosure, and Public Knowledge (with Stephanie Garlock and Annie J. Wang) published in 2020 in a symposium in the Lewis & Clark Law Review, was the basis for a March 2021 op-ed, Unlocking courts: Ending arbitration mandates and gag orders in Hearst media Connecticut news outlets. Other recent essays include The Puzzles of Prisoners and Rights: An Essay in Honor of Frank Johnson in a symposium in the Alabama Law Review; (Un)Constitutional Punishments: Eighth Amendment Silos, Penological Purposes, and People’s “Ruin,” and Constituting Security and Fairness: Reflecting on Charles Reich’s Imagination and Impact, both in the Yale Law Journal forum. 

Anna VanCleave 
Director / Associate Research Scholar [full bio]
Law School Room J33
203-436-3520
anna.vancleave@yale.edu

Anna has served as Director of the Liman Center since 2016. Her work includes co-teaching Liman workshops and supervising students and fellows, particularly on projects related to criminal justice. Her interests include the funding of criminal systems and racial discrimination in jury selection. She continues to litigate and is collaborating on a project at the intersection of public finance and monetary sanctions. Previously, she was a public defender in the District of Columbia and spent a year in New Orleans engaging in indigent defense reform following Hurricane Katrina. She also spent three years as a death penalty litigator at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center and was the Chief of the Capital Division at the Orleans Public Defenders. She was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar at NYU School of Law, from which she graduated.

Elizabeth Keane
Center Coordinator
Law School Room J35
203-432-9165
203-432-4876 fax
elizabeth.keane@yale.edu

Elizabeth manages the operations of the Liman Center. Prior to joining the Center in 2017, she spent nearly a decade at Shipman & Goodwin LLP, where she worked in the department of Legal Marketing and oversaw its business development and marketing communications.

Laura Fernandez
Senior Liman Fellow in Residence [full bio]
laura.fernandez@yale.edu

Laura is a Clinical Lecturer in Law and Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School, in addition to being Senior Liman Fellow in Residence. Her research focuses on questions of prosecutorial power, ethics, and accountability. Before joining Yale Law School, she was Senior Counsel at Holland & Knight, LLP, where she worked as a fulltime member of the Community Services Team. Laura clerked for the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York, and was an E. Barrett Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown Law Center, where she obtained her LL.M. She holds an A.B. in Literature from Harvard College, a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Brian Highsmith
Senior Research Affiliate

Brian is pursuing a Ph.D. program in Government and Social Policy at Harvard. He has been central to the Liman Center’s organization of a series of webinars on Fines, Fees, and Government Funding, which aim to bring together experts in public finance and in monetary sanctions to remedy the unjust use of money as punishment. His article, Defund Our Punishment Bureaucracy, was published in June 2020 in The American Prospect. Brian’s current research focuses on the budgetary costs to governments of policing and punishment systems and the connections between residential segregation and local governments’ reliance on criminal fines and fees. After graduating from Yale Law School in 2017, Brian was a Skadden Fellow at the National Consumer Law Center. He has also worked on policy at the White House National Economic Council, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the office of Senator Cory Booker.

Jonathan Petkun
Senior Research Affiliate

Jon received his J.D. from Yale Law School and his Ph.D. in economics from MIT, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His research uses the tools of applied microeconomics to study questions in empirical civil procedure, employment law, and tax. Jon is especially interested in how the legal and economic organization of large public institutions in the U.S.—particularly the military and state and federal courts—affect the lives of individuals who participate in them. With Judith Resnik, he has explored how publicly available data can shed light on the structure and practices of the federal courts, and how data collection and dissemination could be improved to advance this understanding. His research now investigates how civil filing fees affect access to courts for low-resource litigants and whether discretionary fee waivers mitigate these barriers. Jon is a graduate of Swarthmore College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Dwayne Betts [full bio]
Senior Liman Scholar

Dwayne is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School and the critically acclaimed author of three collections of poetry and a memoir. He conceptualized The Million Book Project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to bring 500 books, a Freedom Library, to 1,000 prisons and juvenile detention centers across the country. His latest book, Felon: Poems, won the NAACP Image Award and the American Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New America Foundation, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, and the Open Society Foundation. Dwayne is also a commissioner on the Connecticut Criminal Justice Commission, and his research focuses on the effects of state administrative law on incarceration and the genesis and long-term societal consequences of incarcerating juveniles with adults. As a Liman Fellow in 2016-2017, he worked in the New Haven Public Defender’s Office. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Affiliated Faculty

Laura Barraclough
Sarai K. Ribicoff Associate Professor of American Studies
Yale University

Trattie Davies
Critic
Yale School of Architecture

Gregg Gonsalves, PhD
Assistant Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Associate (Adjunct) Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Co-Director, Global Health Justice Partnership; Co-Director, Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency

Elizabeth K. Hinton
Associate Professor of History & African American Studies and Professor of Law
Yale Law School

Louisa Lombard
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Yale University

Reena Kapoor
Associate Professor of Psychiatry; Associate Program Director, Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship
Yale School of Medicine

Courtney Skipton Long
Associate Director for Membership Programs, Advancement
Yale University Art Gallery

Jaimie Meyer
Assistant Professor of Medicine; Assistant Clinical Professor of Nursing
Yale School of Medicine; Yale School of Nursing

Lisa Puglisi
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Yale School of Medicine

S. Zelda Roland
Director, Yale Prison Education Initiative
Dwight Hall at Yale, Center for Public Service and Social Justice

Emily Wang
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Yale School of Medicine

Howard Zonana
Professor of Psychiatry and Professor (Adjunct) of Law
Yale School of Medicine

Collaborating Faculty

Fiona Doherty
Yale Law School, Clinical Professor of Law

Lucas Guttentag
Yale Law School, Martin R. Flug Lecturer in Law (Fall Term 2020) and Senior Research Scholar in Law

Advisory Council

Emily Bazelon
Staff Writer, The New York Times Magazine
Yale Law School Senior Research Scholar in Law

Nancy Gertner
Senior Lecturer on Law
Harvard Law School

Vicki Jackson
Thurgood Marshall Professor of Constitutional Law
Harvard Law School

Doug Liman
Producer/Director

Melissa Murray
Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law
Faculty Director, Birnbaum Women's Leadership Network
New York University School of Law

Sia Sanneh
Senior Attorney, Equal Justice Initiative
Yale Law School Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law

McGregor Smyth
Executive Director, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest

Peter Zimroth 
Founding Director of the NYU Law School's
Center on Civil Justice and adjunct professor