Faculty members in the University of Miami Business School’s Department of Business Law recently earned national honors recognizing both sustained career achievement and emerging scholarly impact.

Ann Olazábal, professor and chair of the Department of Business Law, received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award at the 2026 Annual Conference of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business. The award recognizes senior faculty members who have demonstrated a career-long commitment to excellence in business law and ethics.

For Olazábal, the recognition offered a rare opportunity to reflect on three decades spanning scholarship, teaching and leadership.

“This award really caught me by surprise, in the best way,” she said. Most of my career has been spent worrying about the next article, the next class, the next budget or accreditation cycle, so it is quite moving to take a minute, step back, and have thirty years of that work recognized all at once. It really means a lot to me.”

Olazábal points to her scholarship on securities fraud and scienter as among the work she is most proud of intellectually. She said that research shaped how she continues to think about the relationship between legal doctrine and human judgment, including in her current work.

Her contributions to the Business School have also extended well beyond scholarship. Olazábal has served in two vice dean capacities over more than a decade, chaired the Department of Business Law across two terms, and served as interim dean during a period of transition. She has also taught in multiple programs, developed courses, and incorporated AI-based approaches into her teaching.

“When I started, business law and ethics scholarship was fairly siloed from the quantitative side of business. In my opinion, that wall is breaking down,” Olazábal said. “Today some of the most urgent societal questions sit at that intersection: how stakeholder capitalism (or shareholder wealth maximization) holds up under legal and political scrutiny, how AI-driven decision-making gets governed, or even how DEI initiatives are being challenged and redefined in the courts in real time. It’s an exciting point at which to be thinking about the intersection of business, law and society.”

The award also holds special meaning for Olazábal because it recognizes the leadership and service that have defined much of her career.

“I did not step into the administrative work, especially the interim dean role, for recognition or as part of a plan to be a dean somewhere else eventually,” she said. “I did it because the Business School needed someone in those roles, and I happened to be the one who could serve the school well. “Having this award frame that leadership work, along with my editorial work and other service to the academy, as part of a career-long contribution to our field to me is validation that the career choices I’ve made have added up to something that matters.”

Joseph Avery, assistant professor in the Department of Business Law, was also recognized at the conference, receiving the Holmes-Cardozo Distinguished Paper Award for “The AI Penalty in Trade Secret Law,” co-authored with Mike Schuster and Camilla Hrdy. The award recognizes the best working paper submitted to the Academy of Legal Studies in Business Annual Conference.

Using a hypothetical case modeled on a real trade secret dispute, the researchers asked participants to act as jurors. One group read that a company used AI to gather a competitor’s information; the other read that it used human workers. Everything else—the conduct, cost and time involved—was the same. Yet participants were significantly more likely to hold the company legally responsible when it used AI. They also awarded higher damages.

The study builds on Avery’s research into AI bias in copyright and patent law. Trade secret law adds a twist: because it focuses on how information was obtained, treating AI and humans differently can be legally permissible. The researchers explore whether that different treatment serves a useful purpose or risks discouraging innovation.

“It’s such an exciting time to be doing research at the intersection of business, law and AI,” Avery said. “I get to study questions I care deeply about: how people judge, what they value, who they hold responsible. The work keeps challenging my own assumptions and reminding me how much there is still to understand. I feel very fortunate that this is what I get to do for a living.”

Avery was also recently promoted to senior articles editor of the American Business Law Journal (ABLJ), expanding his role in shaping scholarship within the field. He will become managing editor next year and editor-in-chief in 2028.

“I’m honored to take on a growing role at the American Business Law Journal,” he said. “ABLJ is the premier peer-reviewed journal in our field, so it’s a chance to help shape scholarship and steer the field. That’s exciting.”