Should i go to rutgers law

Rutgers-Camden and Rutgers-Newark were unified into a single, jointly administered Rutgers Law School with two campuses in Under the reunification plan, two co-deans, reporting to chancellors at each university in Camden and Newark, lead the merged Rutgers Law School.

Both schools use state-of-the-art distance-learning technology to offer classes to students at both locations. The Camden campus is across the river from Philadelphia, offering easy access to the Philadelphia legal community.

The Newark campus is 90 miles north, just outside of New York City. Rutgers is the oldest law school in New Jersey, and has produced a number of noted alumni and professors emeriti, including U.

The school has a strong focus on diversity. Rutgers offers strong programs in criminal law, civil rights, constitutional law, corporate transactions, intellectual property and international law, as well as new certificate programs in business law and criminal law. Its dual-degree programs enable students to add an interdisciplinary perspective to their study of law.

The school is committed to social justice, with numerous clinics that focus on criminal and youth justice, international human rights, and intellectual property rights, among others. Skip to main content. By most accounts, the structure is unusual. For instance, how does the admissions committee fairly distribute the top candidates or those with greater financial need?

Is fundraising being done by campus or will it be allocated based on which dean raises it? If schools have different policies on tenuring clinicians, will each campus maintain its own separate policy? Filler does allow that a joint Rutgers law school might have the luxury of being more selective with its applicants, thus raising the average entering GPA and reducing scholarships. Until a few years ago, Newark and Camden were considered pretty comparable overall.

But applications to Camden immediately fell off by 25 percent with the news that Rutgers-Camden might be forcibly melded with the academically inferior Rowan.

Nationally the total decline is comparable, though it happened much more gradually. As a result, administrators asked 10 to 12 adjunct professors to take a year off, and students have complained about a dearth of courses and classes.

Last year, all first-year students crammed into one criminal law class because only one out of four approved professors was available to teach it.

Considering law school professors grade on a curve, students rightfully worried that underperforming in the oversized class would significantly harm their GPAs. In the latest U. News and World Report rankings, Newark sunk four places to 87 while Camden plummeted 21 spots into the third tier and its lowest level ever. Hopefully though, the merger will strengthen the school as a whole. In an article published on NJ Spotlight two years ago , Filler himself propagated that view.

He added that each school has spent millions of dollars on capital improvements this decade and that the law schools form a critical part of the new strategic plans adopted in Newark and Camden. Neither Chen nor Oberdiek would speculate about the outcome of an ABA vote this summer, though they both said a visitation committee seemed pleased with what they saw when they toured the schools a few months ago.

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