ABA, Dean Emeritus Leo P. Martinez is the 2024 Robert J. Kutak Award Recipient:

Leo Martinez is Dean Emeritus and Albert Abramson Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California College of the Law San Francisco. He is currently a Managing Director at Anderson, the tax and financial services firm.

Professor Martinez is a past Chair of the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. He is a past President of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). He has chaired or served on more than thirty law school site evaluation visits, and he has assisted more than a dozen law schools in their strategic planning. He is currently Vice-Chair of the WASC Senior College & University Commission (WSCUC).  He is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), he was one of the academic advisers on the ALI’s Principles of the Law of Liability Insurance project, and he was a member of the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education that issued its final report in 2014. He received Public Advocates’ Voices of Conscience Award in 2011, he was elected an honorary fellow of the American College of Coverage Counsel in 2017, and he was presented with the Visionary Award by the then UC Hastings Board of Directors in 2018.

Professor Martinez has lectured and written extensively on legal education and on his chosen fields of tax and insurance law throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia.

He is a co-author of a leading insurance law casebook now in its ninth edition, a co-editor of a four-volume insurance treatise, and the author of many articles on tax, insurance law, and legal education that have appeared in journals including the Stanford Law Review, Tulane Law Review, Rutgers Law Review, Yale Law and Policy Review, China EU Law Journal, ABA Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Journal, and Global Jurist.

Kutak Award Committee Chair Rebecca Hanner White remarked: “I am delighted that Leo Martinez is the 2024 recipient of the Kutak award.  Leo’s service to the academy and to the legal profession have enhanced and made both stronger. As his nominator, Dean Mary Crossley said in her nomination letter, ‘sustained engagement with the practicing bar…sets Leo apart as an academic,’ aptly noting that Leo has ‘contributed to the integration of the values and activities of the three central pillars of the legal profession—the bench, the bar, and the legal academy.’ … Simply put, his leadership and contributions to legal education and to the profession make Leo Martinez the ideal recipient of this important honor.” 

It appears from this list that Leo is the first tax professor to receive the Kutak Award in its 41-year history.