New York State Bar Association Honors Professor for Excellence in Legal Ethics
3.2.2026
Professor Raymond Brescia will receive the New York State Bar Association’s Sanford D. Levy Professional Ethics Award for his lifetime of work in legal ethics and his research on the history and influence of technology in the legal profession.
Brescia is the associate dean for research and intellectual life and the Harold R. Tyler chair in law and technology at Albany Law School where he teaches Legal Ethics and Federal Civil Procedure.
He will be honored March 18 at a meeting at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in New York City. The award will be presented by the association’s Committee on Professional Ethics.
“Professor Brescia is a trusted expert on one of the most critical subjects in our profession. He is among the nation’s top legal ethics scholars and an inspiration to his students and colleagues,” said Kathleen Sweet, president of the New York State Bar Association.
Brescia has written extensively about legal ethics, focusing on the intersection of law with technology, climate change and population growth. He published two books about the legal profession in the last two years: Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession (NYU Press 2024), and Lawyer 3.0: A Guide to Next-Wave Lawyering (Bristol University Press 2025).
“Professor Brescia’s books are original, ambitious, and deeply researched,” said Brenda Dorsett of Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, the chair of the Committee on Professional Ethics. “Our committee recognizes his outstanding scholarly contributions to the field and honors his achievement with the Sanford D. Levy Award.”
Prior to joining academia, Brescia was the associate director of the Urban Justice Center in New York, a Skadden fellow at The Legal Aid Society of New York, a staff attorney at the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, and law clerk to Judge Constance Baker Motley, U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of New York. He received his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School and his bachelor’s from Fordham University.
The award is named for Sanford D. Levy, a former member of the New York State Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics. It has been presented since 1982 to an individual or institution that has contributed the most to the understanding and advancement of the field of professional ethics.
