UCLA School of Law professor Scott Cummings has been awarded the Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility, the top annual honor in legal ethics that the Association of American Law Schools presents.

Cummings earned the award for his recent article “Lawyers in Backsliding Democracy,” which was published in the California Law Review and “explores the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding—the degradation of democratic institutions and practices using law rather than violence.” The Zacharias Prize has been presented by the AALS Section on Professional Responsibility since 2015 to honor a law professor who died in 2009 “after a career as a nationally known expert in professional responsibility, writing on the ethical duties that lawyers have to the legal system and society as well as clients.”

“I can’t tell you how honored I am to be associated with Fred Zacharias. When I was getting going in this field, I devoured Fred’s work, which put legal ethics in wider social context and never shied away from speaking speak truth to power. His work inspired me to think about the role of lawyers in democracy and I hope this article carries on his transformative legacy,” Cummings said in an interview that he conducted with Legal Ethics Roundup on Substack.

Cummings is the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at UCLA Law, where he is the founding faculty director of the Program on Legal Ethics and the Profession, which promotes empirical research and innovative programming on the challenges facing lawyers in the 21st century. Widely renowned for his expertise in the field, he has earned several honors for his work, including a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to study the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding and a 2020 Fulbright award to conduct an interdisciplinary study of how lawyers use strategic litigation to advance claims before European Union courts in support of domestic movements for equality and political inclusion.

He also earned a 2023 UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, which is the university’s highest honor for classroom excellence.

Cummings joined the UCLA Law faculty in 2002. He has been a key member of the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy and teaches courses on legal ethics, local government law and community economic development. His numerous and highly regarded publications include three recent books: An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles (Oxford University Press, 2021), a landmark study of how lawyers have challenged inequality in Los Angeles; Global Pro Bono: Causes, Context, and Contestation (Cambridge University Press, 2022), the first-ever comparative analysis of lawyer volunteerism around the world; and Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America’s Port (MIT Press, 2018), a history of the legal campaign to end labor abuse and environmental damage at the Port of Los Angeles.

Watch Scott Cummings as he explores the role lawyers can play in democratic backsliding.