Oren Bar-Gill is one of the first recipients of a new American Law Institute award

Photo of Oren Bar-GillOn February 17, the prestigious American Law Institute (ALI) announced that it is conferring a Young Scholars Medal on Professor Oren Bar-Gill. The award is new this year, and ALI said it was created “to call attention to academic work that is practical, focused on the real-world, and can influence law for the better.” Bar-Gill was recognized “for his insights into consumer psychology, which are the basis for his proposal of specific legal solutions to match specific problems in the markets for cell phones, subprime mortgages and credit cards.”

In 2009, Bar-Gill and Rebecca Stone ’09 co-authored “Mobile Misperceptions,” an article that ran in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. The piece, which discussed consumer confusion regarding cell phone contracts, attracted the attention of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which invited Bar-Gill to present the paper’s findings to the commission. Bar-Gill also consulted with FCC staff drafting new regulations for the cell phone and other telecommunications service markets. Other articles by Bar-Gill that served as the basis for the ALI medal were “The Law, Economics and Psychology of Subprime Mortgage Contracts,” published in the Cornell Law Review in 2009 and “Seduction by Plastic,” which appeared in the Northwestern University Law Review in 2004.

A group of law school deans nominated more than 70 candidates, all professors in their first decade of teaching, for the Young Scholars Medal, and Bar-Gill was one of two to receive it. The selection committee was chaired by William Fletcher, Professor Emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Posted February 18, 2011