Judith Resnik
Founding Director/Arthur Liman Professor of Law
Law School Room M43
203-432-1447
judith.resnik@yale.edu
Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the founding director of the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law. She teaches courses on federalism, procedure, courts, prisons, equality, and citizenship. Her scholarship focuses on the relationship of democratic values to government services such as courts, prisons, and post offices; the role of collective redress and class actions; contemporary conflicts over privatization; the relationships of states to citizens and non-citizens; the interaction among federal, state, and tribal courts and the forms and norms of federalism; practices of punishment; and equality and gender.
Resnik's forthcoming book, “Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy,” will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2025. The question she poses is whether prisons can escape their ties to plantations and concentration camps. The book charts the invention of the corrections profession that imposed radical restrictions on human movement as if doing so was normal. Resnik weaves together the Enlightenment insistence that punishment be “purposeful,” the stories of people who debated how to punish, and the stories of people living under the regimes that resulted. She excavates the first-ever international rules aiming to improve the treatment of prisoners, which the League of Nations adopted in 1934 as the Nazis rose to power. Her trans-Atlantic account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the U.S. Civil Rights movement, and of pioneering prisoners who insisted law protected their dignity as individuals. Resnik maps the results, including a trial in the United States about the constitutionality of whipping, which was Arkansas’ preferred “discipline” in the 1960s. This book traces the constitutional challenges thereafter to hyper-crowded cells, filth, violence, and profound isolation, as well as the cross-border expansion of the prison industry, waves of abolition efforts, and the impact of legal precepts rejecting “excessive,” “cruel and unusual,” and “degrading” sanctions. Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Resnik argues that governments committed to equality cannot set out to ruin people. Therefore, many contemporary forms of punishment need to end.
