UCLA School of Law David Sanders Professor of Law and Medicine Jill Horwitz has received the ABA’s Outstanding Nonprofit Lawyer Award for 2023. The award, which is presented by the Nonprofit Organizations Committee of American Bar Association’s Business Law Section, goes to “accomplished and civic-minded nonprofit lawyers” in the categories of academic, attorney, in-house counsel and young attorney. Horwitz earned the honor “for distinguished academic achievement in the nonprofit sector.”

A renowned authority in the law of nonprofits and a leading expert in health law and policy , Horwitz is the inaugural faculty director of the Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofits at UCLA Law. She is also a professor of public affairs (by courtesy) at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an adjunct professor of economics at the University of Victoria’s Department of Economics in British Columbia.

As the reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit Organizations, she led the first Restatement on the subject, a landmark development in a burgeoning field whose importance and impact is on the rise.

Under Horwitz’s direction, the Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofits was founded in 2021 in response to emerging changes in the financial landscape as baby boomers pass on and they are expected to transfer tens of trillions of dollars in wealth to younger generations, to well-established nonprofits or to family foundations – a massive financial shift that is set to upend the processes of philanthropy and the governance of nonprofits.

Horwitz previously served as the law school’s vice dean for faculty and intellectual life.

She holds a B.A. from Northwestern University and M.P.P, J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.