About the Event
The Holloran Center will be celebrating its 20th anniversary by hosting the First Annual Holloran Center Conference and Awards Dinner on April 25, 2026. The conference event will also be structured as a University of St. Thomas Law Journal Symposium.
Speakers at the conference/symposium will include leading experts in professional identity formation. Committed speakers include Neil Hamilton, Barb Glesner-Fines, Lou Bilionis, Susan Brooks, Benjamin V. Madison III, Daisy Floyd, and Tim Floyd.
Following the Conference and Symposium, the St. Thomas Law Journal will publish an issue about professional identity formation that includes articles written by several of our speakers.
Registration for the Conference/Symposium and Awards Ceremony is available here!
Awards
As part of the first Annual Holloran Center Conference, the Holloran Center will present the following awards:
- Most Helpful Professional Identity Formation Blog
- Best Professional Identity Formation Teaching Innovation
- Best Professional Identity Formation Program Innovation
- Best Article relating to Professional Identity Formation by a Junior Scholar
- Best Article relating to Professional Identity Formation by a Senior Scholar
If you would like to nominate someone or some law school program for any of the awards above, please send an email with a description of the PIF teaching exercise or program or a link to the blog or article to holloranctr@stthomas.edu. You can self-nominate.
Please feel free to submit a PIF blog for publication to David Grenardo at gren2380@stthomas.edu to be eligible for the blog award. We hope that these awards will also encourage individuals to write meaningful scholarship on PIF.
A committee will review all of the nominees in each category and select a winner for each category.
The winners will be honored at the First Annual Holloran Center Conference Awards Ceremony on Saturday, April 25, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Holloran Center will pay for the award winners’ travel expenses (hotel and flight) to attend the awards ceremony.
Celebrating 20 Years of Generous Support for the Holloran Center
As the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary with this special event, we pause to reflect on the generosity of all those that have uplifted the work of the Holloran Center throughout the last two decades. Our professors and fellows are paving the way on professional identity formation nationally, and the impact continues to grow annually.
John Berry, former chair of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Professionalism Committee and past winner of the ABA’s highest award, the Michael Franck Award for Professionalism, commented on the work of the Center:
“The Holloran Center’s greatest contribution is in uniting the best of legal research and analysis with a real down-to-earth desire to find ways to impact the legal profession and its lawyer participants in a positive way.
The research conducted by the Holloran Center is the most important that can be done for the future of our profession. It matters little if we have smarter and more skilled lawyers if we do not find a way to also make sure they are ethical and motivated in all they do with a well-formed professional identity and orientation toward service. The Holloran Center is leading the way.”
Thank you to our fellows, research assistants, supporters, and donors for everything you do to make the research and scholarship of the Holloran Center possible!
