Panel, lecture honor memory of alumnus

The Law School's Arthur Liman Public Interest Program will host two events on Thursday, Nov. 5: a panel on prisons and courts and an inaugural lecture.

The panel discussion, "Prisons and Courts: Attica and Reform," will take place at 2 p.m. in Rm. 127 of the Sterling Law Building, 127 Wall St. The inaugural Liman Lecture, titled "Trial as Error," will be presented at 4 p.m. that day, also in Rm. 127, by Judith Resnik, the first incumbent of the Liman Professorship at the Law School. Both events are free and open to the public.

The events honor the life and work of the late Arthur Liman '57. While working as a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and providing counsel to a range of corporate and individual clients, Liman also led several major institutions devoted to providing services to those who could not afford lawyers. These included the Legal Aid Society of New York, the Legal Action Center, the Vera Institute for Justice, Neighborhood Legal Services of Harlem and the Capital Defender Project of New York, which Liman helped establish when that state instituted the death penalty.

Panel discussion

The panel discussion, moderated by Law School Dean Anthony Kronman, will consider contemporary prison issues in light of the recommendations of the 1972 report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica, for which Liman served as chief counsel. Cosponsored by the Law School and PublicAffairs Press, the panel has been timed to coincide with the publication of "Lawyer: A Life of Counsel and Controversy," Liman's account of his life in the law.

Panelists will include Paul J. Curran, special counsel at Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler, and chair of the board of Prisoners' Legal Services; Eddie Ellis, director of the Community Justice Center, New York City; Michael Quinlan, former director, U.S. Bureau of Prisons; Steven B. Rosenfeld, partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and deputy general counsel for the New York State Special Commission on Attica; and Tom Wicker, former columnist for The New York Times and author of "A Time to Die," an account of the Attica prison revolt.

Also serving on the panel will be several Law School faculty members: Dennis E. Curtis, clinical professor of law and founder of the Law School's legal assistance programs for prisoners; Harlon L. Dalton, professor of law, who served as a law student volunteer on the New York State Special Commission on Attica; and Brett Dignam, clinical professor of law and a litigator for women at Danbury Prison. The panelists will be introduced by Burke Marshall, the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor Emeritus of Law and the George W. Crawford Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, who is a member of the New York State Special Commission on Attica.

Liman Lecture

Resnik, who joined the Yale faculty in 1997 as the first Arthur Liman Professor of Law, has focused her teaching and writing on procedure, the federal courts, federalism, large-scale litigation and feminist theory.

Resnik's scholarship and work within the legal profession reflect her commitment to enabling women to participate fully in the lives of their communities. She has addressed issues of entry, access and participation of women in a wide array of settings, from the federal courts, as lawyers; to the federal prison system, as incarcerated inmates; to legal education, as professors and as students with voice and authority in the classroom; to legal practice, as lawyers and judges. Resnik has contributed to the restructuring of theories of federalism understood through the lens of feminism, and has explored the role of feminism in the developing discipline of law and literature.

She was a member of the Ninth Circuit Gender Bias Task Force, which was the first within the federal system to report on the effects of gender in a federal circuit court. Her honors include the National Association of Women Judges Florence K. Murray Award in 1993, and, most recently, the Margaret Brent Award from the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession. She has coauthored two books with Law School professors Owen Fiss and the late Robert Cover.