The Rutgers Law National Trial Team won the championship title at the elite invitational Puerto Rico Trial Advocacy Competition in San Juan this past weekend. Trial Team members Paula Echeverria, Livie Ruhl, Elizabeth Weinman, and Melanie Zelikovsky competed. Elizabeth also won the award for Best Advocate in the Competition.
The Rutgers Law National Trial Team began its 2023-24 season by placing as a semi-finalist in the invitational Peter James Johnson National Civil Rights Trial Competition held during the last weekend of October. The team bested some of the most competitive teams in the country. They were edged out in the semi-final round by Cornell Law, who went on to win the Competition.
This year’s Mary Philbrook honoree began helping others create change in public interest long before she earned her law degree at Rutgers in 2002. In 1988, Jodina Hicks created the StreetLeader program as part of her work with UrbanPromise. The teen employment and leadership initiative has resulted in employment for 2,000 Camden teens and has since been replicated in 18 cities and countries.
Rutgers Law School is committed to improving access to legal education, and a new scholarship will ensure that this commitment continues for years to come. Funded by donations from Flaster Greenberg, PC, a law firm based in West Windsor, New Jersey, the scholarship is named in memory of Laura B. Wallenstein, a 1977 graduate of Rutgers Law School and the first woman to ever hold a shareholder position at the firm.
Key donors within Fox Rothschild partnered with clients to create an endowment through Rutgers University Foundation to honor our treasured friend and partner, Harry S. Jackson III, who tragically passed in an automobile accident on July 29, 2022, two days before his 34th birthday.
The Rutgers School of Law–Newark Alumni Association held its annual Alumni Recognition Gala at the Maplewood Country Club on October 24 and recognized three alumni with the Distinguished Alumni Award and the Fannie Bear Besser Award for Public Service. The Alumni Association also awarded two student scholarships at the event.
By all accounts, the Housing Justice Program in Camden, which includes the Housing Advocacy Clinic and Eviction Prevention Project, recently achieved a significant win: a judge agreed with attorney Ashley Maddison ’19 that her client’s rental home was so unsafe it was uninhabitable, ordered the landlord to pay for six months of relocation expenses, and allowed the client to retain nearly $7,000 in withheld rent payments. But the reality is much more complicated, shedding light on the need for support and education right in Rutgers Law School’s own backyard.
The New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (OPD) announced today that it filed a class action lawsuit against the New Jersey State Police (NJSP) to require it to timely process expungement orders. The suit is the result of the collaborative efforts of Rutgers Law School’s Expungement Law Project (ELP) in Camden, OPD, ACLU-NJ, Volunteer Lawyers for Justice (VLJ), and Legal Services of New Jersey. Rutgers Law Professor and ELP Director Meredith Schalick convened this group of stakeholders over the past year to discuss concerns about the criminal expungement process in New Jersey. Sandra Simkins, Rutgers Law professor, and Dr. Sarah Lageson, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice associate professor in Newark, also lent their expertise to the group.
Rutgers Law Professor Jorge Contesse was elected to the United Nations (UN) Committee Against Torture (CAT) on October 19, 2023 in Geneva, Switzerland. This is one of the most prestigious posts in the field of international human rights. Professor Contesse joins nine other independent human rights experts who monitor compliance of the UN Convention Against Torture by state parties. Members are elected to a four-year term and can be re-elected if nominated.
The Stephanie and Harold Krieger Charitable Trust has gifted $6.5 million to Rutgers Law School, the second largest gift in the law school’s history. Of the donation, $5.5 million will be used to establish the new Ruth Bader Ginsburg Women’s Rights and Gender Justice Clinic.
On September 21, 2023, a Rutgers Law Associates (RLA) fellow met a young boy at a ticket counter in Newark Liberty International Airport, handed his passport to United Airlines personnel, and secured his safe return to his father in Ireland. It was the final step in a case that began in April, when the US State Department first reached out to RLA regarding a dispute between an Irish national and his wife, a US citizen who brought their son to live stateside without his consent.
Emilio Gutierrez is an award-winning Mexican journalist, devoted father, University of Michigan Knight-Wallace Fellowship recipient, and National Press Club honoree. Thanks to the work of Rutgers Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), he is also a newly-minted US asylee, protected from ever being deported back to Mexico, where he was intimidated with beatings, home raids, and death threats as a result of his reporting on government and police corruption.