Professor Judith Resnik to Receive Top Honor from National Association of Women Lawyers

Judith Resnik, the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, will be honored in July when she receives the Arabella Babb Mansfield Award, the highest tribute from The National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL).

The award is named after the first American-born woman licensed in 1869 to practice law in the United States. The NAWL presents the award annually to a woman attorney whose career embodies qualities of professional achievement, positive influence, and valuable contribution to the advancement of women’s interests in and under the law. 

Professor Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches about federalism, procedure, courts, equality, and citizenship. She also holds a term appointment as an Honorary Professor, Faculty of Laws, at the University of College London.

Professor Resnik is a Managerial Trustee of the International Association of Women Judges, and she serves as the co-chair of the Judicial-Academic Network of the National Association of Women Judges and as a member of the Academic and Scientific Council for the Gender Equality Project, based in Switzerland. She is a founding co-chair of the Women's Faculty Forum (WFF) at Yale and the current chair of Yale’s Global Constitutional Seminar, a part of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights.

In 1996-97, when coming to Yale, Professor Resnik also became the founding director of the Arthur Liman Public Interest Program, which that year supported one fellowship for Yale Law School graduates. Since then, the program has grown and, as of 2013, 94 graduates will have held one-year fellowships to work in public interest jobs around the United States; students from Yale, Princeton, Spelman, Brown, Harvard, and Barnard receive support for summer Liman fellowships.

Professor Resnik's books include Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (with Dennis Curtis, Yale University Press, 2011), which won a PROSE Award for excellence in social sciences and law & legal studies from the American Publishers Association and a 2012 SCRIBES Award from the American Society of Legal Writers. Resnik is also the author of Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (co-edited with Seyla Benhabib, NYU, 2009).

Some of the Arabella Babb Mansfield award’s past recipients include the Hon. Nancy Gertner (ret.); Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor; then-Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan; Marcia Greenberger, Founder and Co-President of the National Women’s Law Center; and New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye, (ret.).

NAWL, founded in 1899, is the country’s oldest national voluntary legal professional organization devoted to promoting the interests and progress of women lawyers and women’s legal rights and responses to societal issues confronting women worldwide. The award will be presented to Professor Resnik at NAWL’s 2013 Annual Awards Luncheon, to be held on July 25, 2013 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.