Judith Resnik Named First Liman Professor at Yale

Judith Resnik, the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, has joined the Yale Law School faculty as the first Arthur Liman Professor of Law. She resides in New Haven, Connecticut.

Professor Resnik’s teaching and writing focus on legal procedure, the federal courts, federalism, large-scale litigation and feminist theory. Her previous affiliations with the Law School include serving as a lecturer and supervising attorney from 1977-79; acting director of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Program in Criminal Justice, 1979-80; and visiting professor, 1989. In addition, she coauthored two books, “Procedure” and “The Federal Procedural System: A Rule and Statutory Sourcebook,” with Law School professors Owen Fiss and the late Robert Cover.

A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the New York University School of Law, she joined the faculty at the University of Southern California in 1980, having previously taught at the New York University School of Law. She was a law clerk to the Honorable Charles E. Stewart Jr. of the United States District Court, Southern District of New York. She has been a visiting faculty member at the Harvard and University of Chicago law schools. She was a member of the Ninth Circuit Gender Bias Task Force, the first in the country to consider the effects of gender on federal courts, and is currently a consultant to RAND’s Institute for Civil Justice. Her professional affiliations include the Society of American Law Teachers, the National Judicial Education Project and the Judicial Academic Network of the National Association of Women Judges. Her honors include the association’s Florence K. Murray Award in 1993.

The Arthur Liman Professorship was established last year by friends of the 1957 graduate of the Law School who has had a career in both private and public law and gained attention nationwide as Senate counsel to the Iran-Contra Committee.