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UCLA Professor Richard Abel to Receive 2019 ABF Fellows Outstanding Scholar Award

December 14, 2018, Press releases

CHICAGO, Dec. 14, 2018— Richard L. Abel, professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, will receive the 2019 Outstanding Scholar Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation (ABF) at its 63rd Annual Awards Reception and Banquet on Saturday, Jan. 26, 2019. The banquet is one of several events hosted by the Fellows during the Midyear Meeting of the American Bar Association (ABA).

Awarded annually since 1957, the Outstanding Scholar Award is given by the Fellows of the ABF to an individual who has engaged in outstanding scholarship in the law or government. The award recognizes Abel’s decades of socio-legal scholarship, specializing in torts, the legal profession, social justice, and the defense of the rule of law in the U.S. “war on terror.”

Previous recipients of the award include Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School; Lawrence M. Friedman, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford Law School; Richard Posner, former Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Erwin Griswold, Solicitor General of the United States (1967-1973) and former dean of Harvard Law School; and Archibald Cox, Solicitor General of the United States (1961-1965).

Abel is Connell Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, where he taught torts, legal profession and law and social change. He has also been the faculty coordinator for UCLA’s Public Interest Law Program. Abel has taught at Yale, NYU, Fordham, Cardozo, CUNY and USC and lectured widely in the US and around the world. He has practiced law with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law (in Jackson, Mississippi) and the New Haven Legal Assistance Foundation.

In addition to teaching and lecturing, Abel is a prolific writer and editor. He has written 135 articles and 20 books, including “Politics by Other Means: Law in the Struggle Against Apartheid, 1980-1994 (with a foreword by Nelson Mandela), “English Lawyers between Market and State: The Politics of Professionalism” (with a foreword by Lord McKay, the Lord Chancellor), “Lawyers in the Dock: Learning from Attorney Disciplinary Cases” (with a foreword by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor), “Law’s Wars: The Fate of the Rule of Law in the US ‘War on Terror,’” (with forewords by David Cole, ACLU and Vincent Warren, Center for Constitutional Rights), and “Law’s Trials: The Performance of Legal Institutions in the US ‘War on Terror,’” (with forewords by Erwin Chemerinsky, UC Berkeley Law School, and Harold Koh, Yale Law School). He has also edited 9 books, as well as the Law & Society Review and African Law Studies.

 “It is a great honor to receive this award from the ABF—a leader in socio-legal research for more than 60 years—and to be associated with the extraordinarily distinguished array of former awardees,” said Abel. “I’d like to highlight one of these former awardees—Reginald Heber Smith, whose pathbreaking 1919 monograph ‘Justice and the Poor’ inspired later generations, including me, to study how law can advance social justice.”

“The American Bar Foundation is honored to present Richard Abel with the Outstanding Scholar Award,” said Ajay K. Mehrotra, executive director of the ABF.  “Professor Abel and his research exemplify the high standards of rigorous and interdisciplinary scholarship that this award represents.  Long recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the legal profession, Professor Abel joins a long list of distinguished awardees, including Reginald Heber Smith.”

Event Details: 

The Fellows of the American Bar Foundation
Annual Awards Reception and Banquet
Saturday, January 26, 2019 6:00 – 10:00 p.m.
Divine Café at Springs Preserve
333 S. Valley View Blvd
Las Vegas, Nevada

Contact:

fellows@abfn.org
1 (800)-292-5065

About the American Bar Foundation

The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is among the world’s leading research institutes for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions.  To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation.


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Posted by Whitney Peterson

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