2026 Global Leadership Award: Michael Sandel

On April 9, 2024 in Cambridge, MA, the Center on the Legal Profession presented Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, with its 2026 Award for Global Leadership. The award recognizes Professor Sandel’s contributions as a brilliant scholar, teacher, and public intellectual whose work has shaped how we think about justice, markets, and ethics today. Following the presentation of the award, Professor Sandel and David B. Wilkins, CLP faculty director, framed a discussion with the group about preserving the legal profession’s core commitment to independence, fiduciary duty, access to justice, and the rule of law in an increasingly volatile, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous world in which professionals must simultaneously embrace the benefits of open markets and technological change while preserving the public confidence that lawyers are not simply creatures of the market. The award also followed a senior leadership workshop focused on private equity’s interest in legal services investment, called, “Law as a New Asset Class?”

In receiving this award, Professor Sandel joins a select group of past recipients, including Anne-Marie Slaughter, (CEO of New America), Dana Remus (former White House Counsel to President Biden and current partner at Covington & Burling),  D. Y. Chandrachud (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India), Samantha Power (former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations under President Obama and current head of the Agency for International Development), Brad Smith (Vice-Chair and President of Microsoft), the late Vernon Jordan (throughout his distinguished career served as the President of the National Urban League, Senior Managing Director of Lazard Frères, Senior Partner at Akin Gump, a Member of the Board of Directors for several Fortune 500 companies, and a close advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), Katherine Adams (SVP and General Counsel of Apple), and Kenneth Frazier (Executive Chair and former CEO of Merck).