The American Bankruptcy Institute presented Professor Bob Lawless with its highest membership award, the ABI Annual Service Award, at the 2019 Annual Spring Meeting on April 12, 2019. The Service Award is presented to an ABI member whose contributions over the past year have been extraordinary, as determined by ABI’s Advisory Board of past presidents. An ABI member since 1997, Professor Lawless is the official Reporter for the ABI Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy, a two-and-a-half-year study funded by ABI’s Endowment Fund to improve the consumer bankruptcy system.

At Illinois, Lawless is the Max L. Rowe Professor of Law and co‐director of the Program on Law, Behavior & Social Science. In addition to numerous scholarly papers on the bankruptcy system, he is a co‐author for the eighth edition of Secured Transactions: A Systems Approach and the co‐author of Empirical Methods in Law, a textbook on empirical methodologies as applied to the study of law. Lawless administers and contributes to the blog Credit Slips, a discussion on credit, finance and bankruptcy. He also participates in the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a long‐term research project studying persons who file bankruptcy. He is a member of the American Law Institute, the National Bankruptcy Conference and the American College of Bankruptcy.