The Annie Moore Award is bestowed on an individual who has made significant contributions to the Irish and/or Irish American community and legacy.  The  Annie Moore Award is named for the first immigrant to be processed at Ellis Island. The award is bestowed to an individual who has demonstrated a commitment of excellence through business, commerce, education or the arts.

The 2020 Annie Moore Award will be presented to Leo J. Hurley Jr. Partner, Connell Foley LLP

Mr. Hurley is a seasoned litigator with a proven record of success in obtaining favorable jury verdicts, as well as guiding matters to resolution and early settlement. An aggressive advocate in the courtroom, Leo litigates a wide variety of civil and criminal cases in state and federal courts in New Jersey and New York. His practice ranges from complex commercial matters to employment, products liability, class actions, estate and probate, trade secret and corporate dissolution/oppressed minority shareholder litigation. He serves as vice chair in the firm’s Commercial Litigation and White Collar Criminal Defense Practice Groups.

Mr. Hurley punctuates his practice with six years of courtroom experience as an assistant prosecutor in Hudson County, where he prosecuted hundreds of felony cases including homicides, armed robberies and complex financial crimes. He served as lead trial counsel on 16 jury trials and several bench trials, many of which required him to present testimony from and cross-examine expert witnesses in diverse fields such as forensic DNA analysis, mechanical engineering and forensic psychology. Drawing on this experience, Leo routinely advises corporations, government officials and private citizens on compliance with federal and state grand jury subpoenas, associated investigations and prosecutions.

Dr. Murphy was the Joseph I. Dionne Professor of Teacher Education at Hofstra University, in Hempstead New York. She was a Fulbright Fellow St University College, Dublin in 1965-66. She joined the faculty of Hofstra University in 1969 where she served as the Hofstra University Dean of Students from 1984-1993 and Interim Dean of the School of Education, health and Human Services at Hofstra University from 2005-2008. She was named the School of Education’s Outstanding Teacher in 2013.

A past president of the American Conference for Irish studies and a past chair of the International Association for the study of Irish Literatures, Murphy was one of the senior editors of the prize-winning Dictionary of Irish Biography published in nine volumes and on line by the royal Irish Academy and Cambridge University press in 2009. Murphy directed the New York State Great Irish Famine Curriculum project (2001) which won the National Conference for the social studies Excellence Award in 2002; she was the historian of the Irish hunger Memorial in Battery Park City. She serves, with John Ridge, as historian of the Irish mission at Watson House Project which has produced a permanent exhibition, a travelling exhibition and a website with records digitized for 60,000 immigrant women who passed through the Mission.