Business law faculty at the University of Miami Business School recently earned national recognition that reflects a broadening intersection between legal scholarship and emerging technological challenges. 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 honor recognizes senior faculty members who have demonstrated sustained excellence in business law and ethics over their careers.
For Olazábal, the award came after three decades of work spanning scholarship, teaching, and administrative leadership. She has served in two vice dean roles, chaired the business law department across two terms, and acted as interim dean during a transition. Her intellectual focus has centered on securities fraud and scienter, the mental element required to establish fraud liability. That research shaped her thinking about how legal doctrine relates to human judgment, work she continues today.
Olazábal observed that business law and ethics scholarship has historically remained separate from quantitative business research, but that divide is eroding. “Today some of the most urgent societal questions sit at that intersection,” she said, pointing to stakeholder capitalism versus shareholder wealth maximization, the governance of artificial intelligence decision-making, and how diversity and inclusion initiatives face legal challenges in real time.
AI and Human Judgment in Legal Practice
Joseph Avery, assistant professor in the Department of Business Law, received the Holmes-Cardozo Distinguished Paper Award for research exploring how artificial intelligence affects legal accountability. His paper, “The AI Penalty in Trade Secret Law,” was 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.
The research used a hypothetical case modeled on a real trade secret dispute. Researchers asked participants to act as jurors and assigned them to two groups with identical scenarios: one group read that a company used AI to gather a competitor’s information, while the other read that human workers gathered the same information. The conduct, cost, and time involved were identical in both versions.
Results showed a striking pattern. Participants were significantly more likely to hold the company legally responsible when it used AI than when it used human workers. They also awarded higher damages in the AI scenario. This disparity matters because trade secret law focuses on how information was obtained, meaning different legal treatment of AI and human conduct is permitted, unlike patent or copyright law.
Avery’s earlier research examined AI bias in copyright and patent cases. The trade secret study adds a new dimension by testing whether distinguishing between AI and human conduct serves a useful legal purpose or risks discouraging innovation by imposing extra penalties on automated methods.
Emerging Leadership in Peer-Reviewed Scholarship
Beyond his award-winning research, Avery was recently promoted to senior articles editor of the American Business Law Journal, the premier peer-reviewed journal in the field. He will move into the role of managing editor next year and become editor-in-chief in 2028. That trajectory gives him growing influence over which business law scholarship reaches publication and shapes the field’s future direction.
Avery described the research environment as uniquely productive. “It’s such an exciting time to be doing research at the intersection of business, law and AI,” he said. “I get to study questions I care deeply about: how people judge, what they value, who they hold responsible.” His growing editorial role offers a platform to ensure that scholarship addressing those questions remains central to the field’s development.
The national recognition of both Olazábal and Avery reflects a broader shift in business law toward questions that blur traditional boundaries between doctrine and human behavior, between legal rules and technological capability. As courts and legislatures grapple with how to regulate AI and how to enforce traditional legal concepts under novel circumstances, the scholarly work examining those collisions becomes increasingly consequential to legal practice and policy.
The timing of these honors reflects institutions’ and the academy’s growing recognition that business law cannot remain isolated from the technological and social forces reshaping commerce and decision-making. Scholars and practitioners who can work across that intersection, legal doctrine, empirical human behavior, and emerging technologies, are becoming essential to understanding how law actually functions in practice.
