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Professor Judith Resnik Receives Yale Women Faculty Forum Award

Judith Resnik speaking in front of a blackboard
Professor Judith Resnik at the 2025 Liman Colloquium in April.

Arthur Liman Professor of Law Judith Resnik received the 2025 Elga R. Wasserman Courage, Clarity, and Leadership Award from the Women Faculty Forum (WFF) at Yale at a ceremony on Sept. 16.

The Wasserman award was established in 2021 “to honor a Yale woman every year who has demonstrated tremendous courage, clarity, and leadership in their community service.”

Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law Abbe R. Gluck ’00 and Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics Priya Natarajan served as co-presenters at the event. Speakers included Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives Nilakshi Parndigamage and taped video remarks from Rep. Rosa DeLauro.  

“Resnik has been part of a group of women who have helped Yale to engage with the challenges of becoming an institution open to all people,” according to the WFF website. As Yale celebrated its tercentennial in 2001, Resnik was key in the development of the 2001 program, Gender Matters: Women and Yale in its Third Century, which prompted the founding of WFF. She was chair of the WFF from 2005 to 2008.

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 noncitizens; the interaction among federal, state, and tribal courts and the forms and norms of federalism; practices of punishment; and equality and gender. 

Her latest book, “Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy,” will be published in October by the University of Chicago Press. 

The WFF was established in 2001 by senior women faculty during Yale’s tercentennial year to highlight the presence of women at the University and the accomplishments of Yale alumnae.