Justice Richard L. Gabriel to Receive the 2024 American Inns of Court Professionalism Award for the Tenth Circuit

Richard L. Gabriel has been selected to receive the 2024 American Inns of Court Professionalism Award for the Tenth Circuit. Gabriel is a justice for the Colorado Supreme Court. He will receive the award during the Tenth Circuit Judicial Conference in September.

“Justice Gabriel encourages not only lawyers, but everyone involved in the legal profession to see each other as humans, to consider ‘the other side of the story,’ and to practice law with respect and dignity,” writes Courtney McConomy, president of the Minoru Yasui American Inn of Court, who nominated Gabriel on the Inn’s behalf. “In a profession that is highly adversarial, he demonstrates by example that lawyers can, and must, zealously advocate with a respect for both the law and each other.”

Governor John Hickenlooper appointed Gabriel to the Colorado Supreme Court in 2015. Between 2008 and 2015, Gabriel was a judge on the Colorado Court of Appeals. He was previously in private practice, first in New York and then Denver, specializing in commercial, intellectual property, probate, and products liability litigation. He also served as city prosecutor for Lafayette, Colorado. He received a Judicial Excellence Award from the American Board of Trial Advocates’s Colorado chapter in 2023.

Deeply committed to civics education, Gabriel chairs a bilingual civics education program called Our Courts, which is one of only three civics educations programs in the country aimed primarily at adults. Designed to advance the public’s understanding of the state and federal court system, Our Courts has developed more than a dozen programs on topics such as state and federal courts, checks and balances, and various types of proceedings. According to one of Our Courts’s founders, Gabriel has probably given more presentations than any other speaker, addressing working-age adults, seniors, legislators, attorneys, visitors from abroad, and other audiences. Under Gabriel’s leadership, Our Courts won the 2020 Sandra Day O’Connor Award for the Advancement of Civics Education and the 2020 Denver Bar Association Program of the Year Award.

A member of the Yasui Inn since 2009, Gabriel served as its president from 2013 to 2014.

An accomplished trumpeter, Gabriel has performed with Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton Marsalis, and other well-known jazz musicians.

Gabriel earned a cum laude undergraduate degree in American studies from Yale University in 1984. In 1987, he earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where he served as articles editor for the law review.

The American Inns of Court, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, inspires the legal community to advance the rule of law by achieving the highest level of professionalism through example, education, and mentoring. The organization’s membership includes nearly 30,000 federal, state, and local judges; lawyers; law professors; and law students in more than 360 chapters nationwide. More information is available at www.innsofcourt.org.

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We are pleased to announce the recipient of our @InnsOfCourt 2024 Professionalism Award for the 10th Circuit, Justice Richard L. Gabriel of the Colorado Supreme Court. bit.ly/AIC_Gabriel #InnsofCourt #cocourts #yale #pennlaw