The AALS Section on Women in Legal Education Section is thrilled to announce that the Executive Committee has selected Professor Patricia Williams and Professor Peggy Cooper Davis as co-recipients of the 2026 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award from the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education.
More about the award and the many accomplishments of Professor Williams and Professor Davis after the fold.
From the announcement by the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education:
Each year since 2013 (when the award was founded), the AALS Executive Committee for the Section on Women in Legal Education solicits nominations for its Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award. The purpose of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award is to honor a woman who has had a distinguished career of teaching, service, and scholarship for at least 20 years and who has had an impact on women, the legal community, the academy, and the issues that affect women through mentoring, writing, speaking, activism, and by providing opportunities to others. The inaugural recipient was Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself. Since then, the recipients have been Professors Catherine MacKinnon (2014), Herma Hill Hay (2015), Marina Angel (2016), Martha Albertson Fineman (2017), Tamar Frankel (2018), Phoebe Haddon (Chancellor, Rutgers-Camden) (2019), Robin West (2020), Kimberlé Crenshaw (2021), Camille deJorna (Deputy for Legal and Global Higher Education, LSAC) (2022), Cynthia Nance (2023), Martha Minow (2024), and Stacy L. Leeds (2025).
We are delighted to add both Peggy Cooper Davis and Patricia Williams to this amazing legacy! We will celebrate both recipients at two different events during the 2026 Annual AALS Conference, which will be in New Orleans from January 6-9, 2026. We hope to see many of you there!
January 7, 2026, 11:10 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Award Ceremony, Women in Legal Education
January 8, 2026, 6:30-9:30 p.m.: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award Evening Reception and Dinner, Tulane Law School.
Although it would be nearly impossible to describe the accomplishments of these two extraordinary recipients in an e-mail announcement, here is a small sampling of the statements various nominators made in support of this year’s RBG Award recipients:
Professor Patricia Williams
Professor Williams has had a distinguished career as a scholar, teacher, and conscientious member of the legal community. Indeed, she has received numerous accolades and awards for teaching, service, and scholarship throughout her career, including election to the American Philosophical Society; a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Genius Grant, in 2000; and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in the non-fiction category. Professor Patricia Williams is one of the most influential and cited scholars in Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory. For nearly 30 years, she served as a tenured and chaired professor at Columbia Law School, where she retired as the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita. Currently, she is a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University.
Professor Williams helped to shape and reshape a nation of women legal scholars and law students with her scholarship, and particularly with her book The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Mad Law Professor, which allowed many women of color in law schools to feel seen for the first time. Writing in 2015, the Los Angeles Review of Books invoked The Alchemy of Race and Rights as a “seminal work” on “the logic of rights . . . state domination . . . [and] legal protection.” The New York Times asserted that “Williams changed the voice of legal scholarship” with the book. A review in the Boston Review declared, “As a meditation on the searing injuries of racism, on hidden histories in the entrails of legal cases, or on the bankrupt character of contemporary American political life, the effect of Williams’s alchemy is powerful beyond measure.”
Critically, Professor Williams has been a key mentor and supporter for many women scholars, particular women of color scholars. These leaders include so many outstanding faculty in the academy, including Dean Camille Nelson (Hawaii Law); Professor Deborah Archer (NYU Law), who also serves as President of the ACLU; Chaumtoli Huq (CUNY Law); Ngozi Okidgebe (Boston University (BU) Law); and Angela Onwuachi-Willig (BU Law), to name just a few. . . . Professor Williams also has generously given her time to mentor junior scholars through the Equality Law Scholars Forum.
Professor Peggy Cooper Davis
Professor Peggy Cooper Davis has championed civil rights, transformed legal pedagogy, and inspired generations of law students. She has mentored countless lawyers and law professors; many of whom are women whose careers she helped shape and elevate. The trajectory of our profession as legal scholars and educators would simply not be the same without her influence.
First, Professor Davis is a scholar of remarkable breadth and depth. Her work encompasses constitutional law, family law, legal history, and critical race theory, demonstrating an intellectual range that few academics achieve. Her writing consistently bridges theoretical rigor with practical application, making complex legal concepts accessible. Her interdisciplinary approach has enriched legal education by showing students how law is inextricable from history, sociology, psychology, and other fields. Her books, including Neglected Stories: The Constitution and Family Values and Enacting Pleasure, as well as the forthcoming Enacting Freedom, have reshaped understandings of constitutional law, family liberty, and the role of emotion and narrative in legal reasoning.
Professor Davis is also an excellent and innovative educator, having directed the NYU Lawyering Program from 1998 to 2010. Her work in that program and her writing on experiential learning in law school profoundly influenced (and were extensively cited in) the highly influential 2007 study Best Practices for Legal Education. Professor Davis also founded and directed the NYU Experiential Learning Lab, also known as the Professional Pedagogy Lab, where she developed interdisciplinary strategies to address the interpretive, ethical, and social dimensions of legal practice.
Professor Davis has been a pioneer, an inspiration to colleagues and students, and a trailblazing advocate for women in law. Amid her impactful academic career, she continued to litigate pro bono cases and to serve on the boards of many organizations that advocate for justice both locally and nationally. Professor Davis earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1968. She served as a staff attorney for the Community Action for Legal Services in New York, an associate counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Capital Punishment Project, and ultimately a judge of the Family Court of the State of New York. In 1977 she broke barriers as the first African American female professor at Rutgers University School of Law before joining the NYU law faculty in 1983. At a recent symposium held in her honor, speaker after speaker testified not just to her immense influence on legal academia more generally, but to her fierce advocacy for female law school faculty in general and Black women legal scholars in particular.