New York State Bar Association to honor Dean Abramovsky for her academic work

The Professor David D. Siegel Award, named for a longtime Albany Law School faculty member and authority on New York practice, recognizes academic contributions to this area of the law. It’s given by the Torts, Insurance and Compensation Law Section of the New York State Bar Association. Abramovsky will accept the award at the section’s awards luncheon Jan. 30 in midtown Manhattan, part of the bar association’s annual meeting.

“I am thrilled and honored to be recognized by the New York State Bar Association, and particularly by the TICL Section,” says Abramovsky.  “I have dedicated most of my academic career to the nuances of insurance law, and it is the ultimate compliment to have my work acknowledged by the leading insurance law practitioners and experts in our state.”

Dennis McCoy ’77, a past president of the TICL Section and current member of its executive committee, submitted the nomination. The section’s officers made the final decision on conferring the award.

McCoy says the honor recognizes Abramovsky’s body of work particularly in insurance and insurance coverage law, as well as her active role with the state bar, for which she chairs the Task Force on Autonomous Vehicles and the Law. It also acknowledges the symbiosis between legal practice and the academic study of law.  

“We want to recognize academics who are interested in New York law and who are active in the state bar association,” McCoy says. “Professor Siegel would lecture a lot with the state bar, and we want to encourage the academic community to carry on in his spirit.

“One of the dean’s main academic interests is in insurance law and insurance coverage in particular, and she not only writes on it but has litigated cases in that area. And she’s very active in the New York State Bar Association. All of those things came together as factors that made her an obvious choice.”

For those who practice in this area, McCoy says, research into the law helps inform their work. “In terms of the development of the law in New York, we are secondhand recipients of academic work,” he says. “In the research that we do for cases, particularly in the insurance area, things that people write for journals come to our attention. We’re looking more at case law, but academics help us in terms of shaping the law and interpreting it.”

Abramovsky has written numerous articles and legal treatises, including McKinney’s Uniform Commercial Code forms for New York. She is the current editor of LSN Insurance Law, Legislation, & Policy, and she served as the editor and academic adviser for the Connecticut Insurance Law Journal. She also contributed to the British Insurance Law Association’s 2013 Book Prize winner, Research Handbook on International Insurance and Regulation, and her scholarship has been recognized as a “litigation essential” by LexisNexis.