Professor Widman’s scholarship focuses on how our justice systems can better address inequality through increasing access. Her research uses a variety of methods to uncover and propose solutions to gaps in justice throughout our courts, agencies and other legal institutions. Her work has been published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, Cardozo Law Review, Florida Law Review, Administrative Law Review, NYU Annual Survey of American Law, Yale Law and Policy Review, Buffalo Law Review, Journal of Law and Policy, Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights and Social Justice and in other legal and peer-reviewed journals, books, congressional testimony, and court documents. She is the Secretary of the AALS Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education and the Legal Profession and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
Her practice background is in access to justice policy, as Deputy Director of the National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham Law School, the Legal Director at the Center for Justice & Democracy at New York Law School, and a Research Fellow at the Center for Environmental and Land Use Law at New York University Law School. In 2022, she was named a law faculty fellow at the Office of General Counsel, United States Office of Management and Budget. As a consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States, Professor Widman has researched best practices for agencies to identify and reduce administrative burdens.
Professor Widman teaches torts, administrative law, law and inequality, and legal writing. In addition, she has taught federal courts, legislation, advanced torts, legal writing, and policy advocacy courses focused on access to justice issues at Northern Illinois University College of Law and Fordham Law School. In 2021, students and faculty awarded her Professor of the Year.
Professor Widman received a J.D. from New York University Law School and a B.A. in comparative literature and creative writing from Northwestern University. She clerked for Magistrate Judge Theodore H. Katz of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She is a member of the New York bar.