The Association of American Law Schools has named William P. Alford ’77, the Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, as the recipient of the 2026 Section on East Asian Law and Society Jerome A. Cohen Lifetime Achievement Award. The award recognizes a career of exceptional teaching, service, and scholarship that has profoundly shaped the field of East Asian law and society.
First established in 2022 to honor the field’s pioneers — beginning with Professor Jerome A. Cohen as the inaugural recipient — the Jerome A. Cohen Lifetime Achievement Award honors individuals with at least 20 years of distinguished contributions to East Asian Law and Society. Recipients are recognized for their lasting impact on the legal community and the academy through mentoring, writing, speaking, activism, and the creation of opportunities for others in the field.
Alford’s career exemplifies these ideals. A leading scholar of Chinese law and comparative law, he served 18 years as vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Under his leadership, the law school expanded its faculty and curriculum, launched its first international exchange programs, and opened its doors to unprecedented numbers of outstanding law students from around the world.
Cohen, who died this past September, was a longtime professor at Harvard Law School, joining the faculty in 1964 and founding the law school’s East Asian Legal Studies program. In an In Memoriam tribute, Alford described his former teacher and mentor as “an extraordinary figure whose impact both on the larger world and at a personal level was and remains enormous.”
The Jerome A. Cohen Lifetime Achievement Award is administered by the AALS Section on East Asian Law and Society, one of the association’s 108 sections organized around key academic disciplines and areas of professional interest. This year’s section award winners were formally recognized during the 2026 AALS Annual Meeting on Jan. 9.
Austen Parrish, AALS president and dean and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said: “The inspiring individuals recognized this year with section awards are fabulous leaders, teachers, and scholars, and the programs and institutions honored are so well deserving. As we mark the association’s 125th anniversary, it’s appropriate to pause to highlight excellence and leadership in legal education.”
Alford’s work as a scholar, teacher and academic administrative leader has been widely recognized. Of particular note, in 2010, the University of Geneva awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Law and in 2015, the Harvard Law School Association presented him its annual award, with a citation commending his scholarship in Chinese law, his work on disability rights, his being a “law professor par excellence,” and his “visionary leadership” that “represent[s] the best qualities of Harvard Law School.”
In 2019, a leading Chinese academic society, the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law, awarded him its annual Li Buyun Prize in recognition of his scholarship and work on disability rights (the stipend for which Alford, in turn, donated to Special Olympics China).
His books include “To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization” (Stanford University Press 1995), “Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia” (Harvard East Asian Legal Studies 2007), “Falu Baozhang Jizhi Yanjiu (A Study of Legal Mechanisms for the Protection of Persons with Disabilities)” (in Chinese) (Huaxia Press 2008, with Wang Liming and Ma Yu’er), “Prospects for the Professions in China” (Routledge 2011, with William Kirby and Kenneth Winston), and “Taiwan and International Human Rights: A Story of Transformation” (Springer 2019, with Jerome Cohen and Lo Chang-fa), which was awarded the American Society of International Law 2020 Certificate of Merit in a Specialized Area of International Law.
Alford is the founding chair of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability which provides pro bono services on issues of disability in China, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam and several other nations. He is lead director and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors of Special Olympics International (which serves individuals with intellectual disabilities in more than 170 jurisdictions around the world). In 2008, Special Olympics honored him for his work for persons with intellectual disabilities in China. He is also the senior adviser for Graduate and International Legal Studies at HLS.
He is a graduate of Amherst College (B.A.), the University of Cambridge (LL.B.), Yale University (graduate degrees in History and in East Asian Studies) and Harvard Law School.
Want to stay up to date with Harvard Law Today? Sign up for our weekly newsletter.