Professor Judith Resnik Named Outstanding Scholar By American Bar Foundation

Yale Law School Professor Judith Resnik is the 2008 recipient of The Fellows of the American Bar Foundation Outstanding Scholar Award, presented annually to an individual “who has engaged in outstanding scholarship in the law or in government.”

Professor Resnik joins a distinguished group of scholars who’ve received the award since it was established in 1957.  Prior recipients include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Richard Posner, and Louis Henkin. She is the seventh recipient from Yale Law School. Previous recipients from the Law School are Arthur Corbin (1966), James William Moore ’35 (1978), Geoffrey Hazard (1986), Boris Bittker ’41 (1987), Guido Calabresi ’58 (1998), and Stanton Wheeler (2004).  She is the fifth woman so honored.

“Judith Resnik has had a profound impact on the rule of law and administration of justice in our country,” said Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh. “Her perceptive and powerful scholarship makes her a most fitting successor to the past recipients from our School.”

Professor Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches about federalism, procedure, constitutional relationships among branches of the U.S. government, large-scale litigation, feminism, and local and global interventions to diminish inequalities and subordination. She is the author of books and essays, and her recent work includes “Representing Justice: From Renaissance Iconography to Twenty-First Century Courthouses” (with Dennis E. Curtis), published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society; “Law’s Migration: American Exceptionalism, Silent Dialogues, and Federalism’s Multiple Ports of Entry,” published in Yale Law Journal; and “Law as Affiliation: ‘Foreign’ Law, Democratic Federalism, and the Sovereigntism of the Nation-State,” published in the International Journal of Constitutional Law (I*CON). 

Professor Resnik is the founding director of the Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellowship and Fund, which provides post-graduate fellowships annually to several Yale Law graduates to do public interest work and which provides summer fellowships for students at Barnard, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Spelman and Yale. The Liman Program also convenes reading groups and holds an annual colloquium at Yale Law School to focus on issues of social justice. Professor Resnik is also a co-chair of The Yale Women Faculty Forum, a university-wide group aimed at fostering scholarship about gender and community for women at Yale.
 
Professor Resnik is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. She holds degrees from Bryn Mawr and the New York University School of Law, where she was an Arthur Garfield Hays Fellow. She is also an occasional litigator and has testified many times before Congressional and Judicial committees.

Professor Resnik will accept her award on February 10, 2008, at the Fellows Annual Banquet at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles.