Phil Nichols, the Wharton School’s Joseph Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility in Business and professor of legal studies and business ethics, has been awarded the 2020 John Bonsignore Memorial Award for Exceptional Teaching of Legal Studies. The Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) recognizes a career of exceptional teaching at its annual conference, which was held virtually this year in early August. The Bonsignore Award is one of the highest and most prestigious awards given by the ALSB.

Mr. Nichols’ research and teaching on emerging economies and on corruption draw from multiple disciplines. He asks students to look at the world in new ways, and his pro bono activities in dozens of countries, in which he often involves students, bring to his classes perspectives on justice and advocacy for the people of the world. For the past 24 years, Mr. Nichols and his family have lived with undergraduate students in Penn’s Stouffer College House, during which time they have shared in the undergraduate experiences of many hundreds of students.

Mr. Nichols is a past ALSB president and an internationally known expert and consultant in corruption, emerging economies, international trade, and investment. Mr. Nichols also won the Hoeber Memorial Award at this year’s ALSB conference. The Hoeber Award recognizes the outstanding article in the 2019-2020 volume year of American Business Law Journal (ABLJ), the flagship journal of the ALSB with an acceptance rate of less than 5%. Mr. Nichol’s award-winning article was “Bribing the Machine: Protecting the Integrity of Algorithms as the Revolution Begins.”