Professor Jonathan Brown Recognized with 2022 Ottinger Award for Faculty Achievement

Professor Jonathan Brown has been named the recipient of the 2022 Ottinger Award for Faculty Achievement. The Richard Ottinger Faculty Achievement Award is awarded annually by the Faculty Development Committee, in consultation with the Dean, in recognition of a full-time professor’s outstanding service to the law school, the legal profession, or both. The award generally is based on the faculty member’s outstanding service during the previous academic year.

In announcing the award to Professor Brown, Professor Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer, as chair of the Faculty Development Committee, remarked:

“This past year, Jonathan Brown has done incredible work bringing new funding for our Food and Farm Business Law Clinic. Through this hard work and lobbying, he secured significant additional funding for the Clinic. His work and this funding raised the profile of the clinic across the state, allowed the clinic to retain a staff attorney that we hired last year and to make an additional hire to assist with the administrative and programmatic work of the clinic, freeing up Professor Brown and the staff attorney to have more time for students and clients, and further expanding the reach of the clinic by allowing for a broader capacity for intake and referrals. Professor Brown’s work is good for current students, for clinic clients, for the food system across New York state, and as the clinic’s reputation grows, it is good for attracting new students to Pace. Thank you, Professor Brown!”

The Ottinger Award for Faculty Achievement is named in honor of Richard L. Ottinger, who served in the United States House of Representatives for eight terms, from 1965 to 1971 and from 1975 to 1985. Ottinger was Dean of the Law School from 1994 to 1999 and is the founder of the Pace Energy Project, now known as the Pace Energy and Climate Center.

Jonathan Brown has been a member of the Pace faculty since 2016. He is the founder and director of the school’s Food and Farm Business Law Clinic (formerly the Food and Beverage Law Clinic), which launched in January 2017. The Food and Farm Business Law Clinic provides pro bono transactional legal services to small farm businesses, artisan food manufacturers, craft beverage entrepreneurs, and related nonprofit organizations. Through this work, the Clinic seeks to facilitate the development of a more just and sustainable regional food system and economy. Prior to joining the Pace faculty, Professor Brown was a Clinical Lecturer in Law and Eugene Ludwig/Robert M. Cover Fellow in Law at Yale Law School, where he co-taught the Community and Economic Development Clinic. Previously, Brown was a senior associate at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, in New York. Professor Brown serves on the board of the Northeastern Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY), New York’s leading non‐profit organization providing programs and services to promote sustainable, local organic food and farming.