A Centennial History of Rutgers Law School in Newark: Opening a Thousand Doors

Founded in 1908 as New Jersey Law School, Rutgers School of Law, Newark possesses a distinctive spirit of excellence, opportunity and innovation. From the beginning, the school welcomed women and the children of immigrants. For the past forty years, its student body has embraced racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, literally changing the face of the legal profession. Rutgers Law has pioneered clinical legal education, instilled in its students a commitment to social justice and public service and counted numerous top scholars and practitioners among its faculty. Not infrequently in its first one hundred years, Rutgers Law has overcome societal, governmental and economic upheavals. Now, new challenges confront it. Distinguished professor of law Paul Tractenberg chronicles the first century and looks with optimism to the future.

Paul Tractenberg has been a faculty member at the law school since 1970 and during his long tenure there has played a major role in many of the struggles described in this book, including, prominently, the efforts to achieve and maintain student and faculty diversity and to instill in all students a commitment to using law to achieve social justice. This book is the result of a collaborative effort between Professor Tractenberg and the twelve students in his 2008, 9 special Centennial Seminar at Rutgers Law School. The students had the idea of producing a book and submitting draft chapters, instead of traditional seminar papers, for the major part of their accountability. Their submissions became the basis of the book and Tractenberg edited, reorganized and augmented their work, building both on his long experience at Rutgers Law and his own research.