Everything was going according to plan for Dhara Patel. She had leveraged her graduate-level training in accounting to build a successful career for herself, first at a Big Four accounting firm, then at a smaller consulting group. Eventually, she left the corporate world and joined her family’s business, where she started her own consulting company. Patel quickly realized how often she worked with attorneys in this new role and how much legal work was embedded in her new responsibilities, from drafting leases for residential and commercial tenants to writing employment contracts for office workers. Getting her JD just made sense.

Jing Kong, a 3L student at Rutgers Law School, has been named the latest recipient of the Hon. Giles S. Rich Diversity Scholarship. This competitive and prestigious award is granted each year by the New York Intellectual Property Law Education Foundation (NYIPLEF) to a minority student representing a group that has been traditionally underrepresented in the legal profession. A trailblazer both personally and professionally, Kong is the first in her family to attend college, earn a Ph.D., immigrate to the U.S., attain U.S. citizenship, and earn a J.D. This summer, she will launch her legal career as a summer associate with the life sciences patent litigation team at O’Melveny & Myers.

President Biden signed a bill to force the sale of TikTok by ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns it, or ban the widely popular video app in the United States. 

Rutgers Law School’s Association for Public Interest Law (APIL) in Camden raised more than $17,000 to fund law students working in unpaid summer public interest positions. Every qualifying student who applied for a stipend will be funded thanks in part to APIL’s two fundraisers in April – an auction and a 5K run.

Serving clients in both the United States and Côte d’Ivoire demands that M’Ballou Sanogho master two distinct legal systems and professional codes of conduct.

Two trailblazing Rutgers Law alumni will deliver the Commencement addresses at the law school ceremonies next month. Justice Fabiana Pierre-Louis ’06, the first Black woman to serve on the New Jersey Supreme Court, will deliver Camden’s address on May 16 at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion. Judge Zahid N. Quraishi ’00, the first Muslim American to serve as an Article III judge in the United States, will give Newark’s address on May 24 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Both ceremonies will be livestreamed.

For children with disabilities, the timely implementation of special education programming and services is crucial for their learning, literacy, and overall development. This urgency is reflected in the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which mandates that disputes over special education services be resolved within 45 days. However, a recent class action lawsuit including more than 5,000 children with disabilities and their families revealed that the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) has failed to meet this requirement for decades.

Wade J. Henderson, who will be inducted into the Rutgers Hall of Distinguished Alumni, has been a champion of civil and human rights for decades. 

Rutgers Law’s National Appellate Advocacy Team won this year's Touro Law & Religion Appellate Advocacy Competition. Second-year part-time students Ralph Passante and Brian Clark bested 19 schools to take the top spot in this competitive tournament.

Rutgers Law School hosted a special U.S. postal stamp dedication honoring a legal and civil rights pioneer. The Honorable Constance Baker Motley was the nation’s first Black female federal judge, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. She was also the first Black female state senator in New York and the first Black female Borough President of Manhattan.

Yolanda Vázquez is teaching Property as this year’s Paul A. Rudino Visiting Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School in Newark. She is on leave from the University of Cincinnati College of Law where she teaches criminal procedure, property, immigration, and “crimmigration” (the intersection of criminal law and immigration law.)