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The Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University is pleased to announce that it has selected Professor Aisha Saad to receive the 2026–2027 Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award. Presented annually, the award recognizes an emerging environmental law professor who exhibits scholarly excellence and promise at an early stage in their career. The Haub Environmental Law Faculty solicits nominations from law professors throughout the country and selects a recipient from that pool of nominees.

Professor Saad is an Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where her areas of expertise include environmental law, business organizations and securities regulation, and torts. Her scholarship brings together interests in environmental law and corporate governance, examining important questions about the relationship between law, business, and environmental and social challenges.

“We are delighted to recognize Professor Saad with this year’s Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award,” said Margot J. Pollans, Gilbert and Sarah Kerlin Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Development at Haub Law. “Her scholarship brings a thoughtful and interdisciplinary perspective to important questions at the intersection of environmental law and corporate governance. We look forward to welcoming her to Haub Law and engaging with her work as part of our Future Environmental Law Professors Workshop.”

Prior to joining Georgetown Law, Professor Saad was a Dickerson Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, a fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and editor of the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, as well as the inaugural Bartlett Fellow at Yale Law School. Professor Saad is also an Honorary Research Associate at Oxford University and leads executive education programming for Oxford’s Sustainable Law Program. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Boston College Law Review, Nature Climate Change, the Columbia Business Law Review, the Berkeley Business Law Journal, the Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, and in edited volumes by Routledge and Palgrave MacMillan.

“I am honored to receive the Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award and to join the remarkable group of scholars who have received this recognition,” said Professor Saad. “The award is especially meaningful to me because of Haub Law’s longstanding leadership in environmental law and its commitment to ambitious scholarship in the field. I am grateful to the Haub Environmental Law Faculty for recognizing my work at a formative stage in my scholarly career, and I very much look forward to visiting in September to share my work and engage with faculty, students, scholars, and others in the broader environmental law community.”

Professor Saad holds a JD from Yale Law School, a doctorate in Geography and the Environment from Oxford University (where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar), and a BS in Environmental Health Science from UNC Chapel Hill.

As the 2026–2027 Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar, Professor Saad will present her scholarship to the Haub Law community as part of the Law School’s annual Future Environmental Law Professors Workshop. The workshop brings together current and aspiring environmental law academics and provides insight and guidance on entering the academic teaching market.

Professor Saad joins a distinguished group of past recipients of the award, which for more than a decade has recognized emerging scholars making important contributions to environmental law and related fields.

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Professor Yiran Zhang, Proskauer Assistant Professor of Employment and Labor Law at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) and an Associate Member of the Cornell Law School faculty, has been selected as the recipient of the 2026–2027 Haub Law Emerging Scholar Award in Women, Gender & Law for her article Family Caregiving as Work?, forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review.

Zhang's article examines the rapidly growing class of publicly paid family caregivers under Medicaid home- and community-based services (HCBS) programs, who are compensated as employees while remaining embedded in interdependent relationships with the family members for whom they care. The article identifies a “work contradiction” at the heart of current law: classifying family caregivers as employees extends workplace rights, qualifies caregivers for social insurance, and satisfies safety-net work requirements, but treating care payments as wages can simultaneously trigger the loss of means-tested benefits, such as Section 8 housing subsidies, or expose caregivers to income garnishment in bankruptcy. Zhang argues that neither work law nor welfare law alone can govern the realities of family caregiving, and calls for deliberately strengthening a hybrid work/welfare category that protects caregivers’ interests as laborers while sustaining the interdependency at the heart of caregiving relationships.

Professor Zhang's research studies the interaction among family, market, and state through the lens of care, other work, and money. Her current project employs a socio-legal approach to examine care subsidy programs in the United States, and she also writes about gender and the boundaries of work law. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Stanford Law & Policy Review, Law & Social Inquiry, among others. She holds an SJD and an LLM from Harvard Law School and an LLB from Tsinghua University.

Professor Margot Pollans, Haub Law's Associate Dean for Faculty Development, commented: “I’m thrilled the committee selected Professor Zhang for this award. Her article skillfully bridges family law and work law in order to take seriously the hybrid nature of family caregiving work. Focusing in particular on family caregivers who are eligible for payment through Medicaid, she explores the legal and personal consequences of classifying these payments as wages versus as welfare. Her account of the 'work contradiction' reframes a problem regulators and courts have struggled with for years, and it gives us real analytical tools for thinking about how the law should value care work going forward.”

The Haub Law Emerging Scholar Award in Women, Gender & Law is presented annually in recognition of outstanding legal scholarship related to gender and the law by a full-time law professor with five or fewer years of teaching experience. Papers are selected through a blind review process conducted by a committee of Haub Law faculty with expertise in gender and law. This year’s judges were Emily Gold Waldman, Jessica Miles, and Bridget Crawford. The award recipient will be invited to present her work to the Haub Law community during the 2026–2027 academic year.

Nominations for the 2027–2028 award are due by July 1, 2027, and should be emailed to Professor Bridget Crawford.