David J. Reiss, clinical professor of law and research director of the Blassberg-Rice Center on Entrepreneurship Law at Cornell Tech, was among the distinguished law professors honored at an awards ceremony held January 9 during the Association of American Law Schools’ (AALS) Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

Reiss was recognized with the Section on Commercial and Consumer Law Juliet Moringiello Mentorship Award, which was also given to Senator Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School (Emeritus). “I am extremely honored to share this award with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is a hero to many of us who work on consumer protection issues in the financial sector,” said Reiss.

Kara Bruce, head of the AALS Section on Commercial and Consumer Law and the Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, presented Reiss with the award.

“In his twenty-three-year career in law teaching, David has founded and directed a variety of law clinics, merging discrete areas of law such as real estate, consumer, and small business law into programs that offer broad support to the communities they serve. Along the way, he has guided and supported many clinicians, adjuncts, and fellows as they found their footing in legal academia,” said Bruce.

Praised for his mentorship-focused activities at Cornell, Reiss spent the past semester co-teaching with Robert MacKenzie, the Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP Clinical Teaching Fellow at New York University School of Law, as he entered the academy. “Watching his excitement as he figures out how he wants to approach teaching, scholarship, and service over the decades to come is a joy in its own right. And to the extent I can offer any advice that he might find useful, I am very happy to do so,” said Reiss.

Reiss remains connected with the practicing bar as a fellow of both the American College of Real Estate Lawyers and the American College of Mortgage Attorneys. He also has a forthcoming book, Paying for the American Dream: How to Reform the Market for Mortgages, that will be published by Oxford University Press.

At the award ceremony, Reiss said, “Receiving this award drove home to me how we are a community of scholars who work with each other and rely on each other to make sense of the immense complexity of commercial law and to understand the implications of its structure for consumers and businesses.”