Michael Crispi ’27 Wins First Place in ABA Business Law Student Writing Contest
Brooklyn Law School student Michael Crispi '27, a rising 3L, has been awarded first place in the Mendes Hershman Student Writing Contest. This highly regarded legal writing competition from American Bar Association (ABA) Business Law Section encourages and rewards law students for their outstanding writing on business law topics.
It is the first time a Brooklyn Law School student has appeared among the competition’s published award recipients, according to the ABA’s winners archive, which dates to 2018.
This year’s winning paper, which Crispi wrote as his student note, is titled "Green Promises, Legal Gaps: ESG Class Actions in the U.S. and Lessons Learned from the EU’s CSRD," and its publication is forthcoming in the Brooklyn Journal of International Law, Volume 52.
The note examines the fragmented U.S. approach to policing misleading environmental, social, and governance (ESG) claims and argues that the deeper problem lies upstream, as federal securities law does not require sufficiently standardized sustainability information in companies’ periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Crispi explained. Drawing structural lessons from the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the SEC’s recent climate-disclosure rulemaking, it proposes a narrower Regulation S-K framework that calibrates disclosure depth and compliance timing by issuer size and operational footprint. The framework combines a limited table of recurring climate-related monetary categories with a short methodology note and management responsibility statement to produce more comparable, administrable, and investor-useful disclosures in annual reports on Form 10-K.
Centennial Professor of Law Dana Brakman Reiser, who met Crispi when he was enrolled in her Corporations class in the Fall 2025 semester, taught the approximately 100 students in the class using the Socratic method. She recalled that Crispi was "always prepared when I called upon him, provided thoughtful answers and insights, and frequently asked questions that clarified the discussion and moved the class forward." After reading his note, Brakman Reiser was so impressed that she suggested that Crispi apply for the ABA award and provided a recommendation. She was delighted to hear the recent news that he had won.
"He chose a challenging topic, examining the SEC’s climate disclosure framework at the very moment it was being dismantled," Brakman Reiser said. "Undaunted, Michael developed a novel thesis arguing greater disclosure was warranted in order for the traditional U.S. securities-regulation system to work. This approach required him to research not only securities but also other types of class action litigation and to understand the differing approach of the European Union, but it deftly sidestepped some of the polarizing political debates around ESG."
In addition, the writing was "terrific," Brakman Reiser said, and Crispi continued to refine it. "His first draft read like many final, published student notes, but he did not stop there—continually revising and improving it long after publication decisions were made," she said.
A Growing Interest in Corporate Law
It was Professor Brakman Reiser's Corporations course that introduced Crispi to the challenges of corporate disclosure and shareholder transparency, sparking an interest that ultimately shaped his note. "Those issues aligned closely with my broader interest in complex litigation and class actions, the area in which I plan to build my practice," he said.
Selected to serve as Executive Articles Editor for Volume 52 of the Brooklyn Journal of International Law, Crispi is also a member of the Moot Court Honors Society, Appellate Division, and the 2026–2027 Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Team. Earlier this year, he and his partner Hannah Lee '27 (also a rising 3L) placed third in the Saul Lefkowitz Trademark Moot Court Competition, becoming the first Brooklyn Law School team in the competition’s history to place.
Currently, Crispi is working as a summer associate at Bursor & Fisher, where he focuses on complex plaintiff-side data-privacy class actions. He has accepted an offer to return to the firm as an associate after graduation this spring and expects to focus his practice on representing plaintiffs and putative classes against major corporate defendants under evolving federal and state privacy statutes, including the Federal Wiretap Act, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, and California’s Automated License Plate Recognition Privacy and Usage Act.
The prize amount is $1,000 and a summary of the note will be published in the Spring 2027 issue of the prestigious ABA publication The Business Lawyer.