Rachel F. Moran has been honored with the 2026 Outstanding Scholar Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation (ABF). Moran will be recognized during the 70th Annual Fellows Awards Reception and Banquet, which will be held in San Antonio, Texas, on Friday, February 6.
The Outstanding Scholar Award is given annually to an individual who has engaged in outstanding scholarship in law or government. This year, the ABF recognizes Moran for her commitment to the advancement of scholarship addressing race and the law, and for her contributions to scholarship focused on Latinx Americans.
“Rachel F. Moran’s research addresses many of the most pressing issues of our time and is invaluable to legal scholars, students, and practitioners,” said Chair of the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation Jennifer L. Parent. “It is a privilege to honor her with this award.”
Moran is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Education Law Program at Texas A&M University. She previously served as the Chancellor’s and Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Faculty at University of California, Irvine and as the Dean Emerita and Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. Moran was also previously the Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law at Berkeley Law School.
Moran’s scholarship focuses on educational policymaking and the law, Latinx-related law and policy, race and the law, legal education, the legal profession, and torts. She is the author or coauthor of numerous articles, book chapters, and short commentaries. Her books include Educational Policy and the Law (Cengage Learning, 2011, with Yudof, Levin, Ryan, and Bowman), Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Race Law Stories (Foundation Press, 2008, with Carbado).
Moran was named the inaugural William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law by the ABF in 2015. As Neukom Chair, Moran launched a research project titled The Future of Latinos in the United States: Law, Opportunity, and Mobility. Created in collaboration with Robert L. Nelson, who is now the Director Emeritus and the MacCrate Research Chair at the ABF, the project is a nationwide interdisciplinary research initiative. It aims to produce innovative scholarship about Latinx people in the United States, and to identify interventions with the potential to promote opportunity and mobility for Latinx people through law and policy.
In 2011, Moran was appointed by President Barack Obama to the US Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise, a committee which documents and disseminates the history of the United States Supreme Court.
Moran has served as President of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), and she previously served on the AALS Executive Committee. She was appointed to the American Bar Association (ABA) Task force on the Financing of Legal Education and was also a member of the Standing Committee for the ABA Division on Public Education.
Moran is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a member of the American Law Institute, and a Fellow of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Among other honors, Moran is the recipient of the 2025 Professor Michael Olivas Educational Excellence Award from the Hispanic Lawyers Section of the State Bar of Texas as well as the 2025 Michael A. Olivas Award for Outstanding Leadership in Diversity and Mentoring in the Legal Academy from the Association of American Law Schools.
“It is an honor simply to be a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Receiving this award is especially meaningful because the colleagues who selected me are extremely distinguished themselves,” said Moran. “It’s also particularly gratifying because some of my research involves work that I did at the ABF as the inaugural William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law. I am deeply grateful for all the generous support that the ABF has given me.”
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About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is the world’s leading research institute 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.