Biography

Professor Baltz teaches and writes about the tenant movement and the law. His scholarly interests are at the intersection of property, access to justice, and law and social movements. 

He is the co-director of the Housing Justice and Tenant Solidarity Clinic, where students learn civil litigation and organizing skills while supporting community organizations to build leadership, capacity, and power. The Clinic focuses on representing organized tenants, including by litigating on behalf of tenant associations, defending tenant members against retaliation, and advising on campaigns.

Professor Baltz joined Rutgers-Newark from NYU School of Law, where he was a legal fellow at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Previously, he worked as a tenant lawyer at TakeRoot Justice, where he collaborated with tenant organizers and represented New York City-based tenant unions in rent strikes, tenant-initiated receivership actions, landlord bankruptcies, and legislative advocacy. He was also a member of United Auto Workers Local 2320 and served on the team that negotiated TakeRoot's first collective bargaining agreement. He began his legal career as a Ford Foundation Fellow at Make the Road New York, where he litigated wage and hour and employment discrimination cases on behalf of organized immigrant workers.

At Harvard Law School, he worked closely with City Life/Vida Urbana through both Project No One Leaves and the Foreclosure Task Force at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. As a law student, he was awarded a Peggy Browning Fellowship as well as the Betty Allenbach Award for Commitment to the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. Prior to law school, he lived and worked in Annunciation House, a migrant shelter in El Paso, Texas, and was a Jesuit Volunteer based at the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice in Boyle Heights. He is a graduate of Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Publications

Articles & Working Papers

Rent Strike Bond Funds (work in progress).

A Critical Reflection on a Wagner Act for Tenant Unions (work in progress).

Landlord-Tenant Collective Bargaining (work in progress).

Tenant Union Law, 43 Yale Law & Policy Review 1 (2024); reprinted in 34 Journal Affordable Housing & Community Development Law 243 (2025).

Resurrecting the Rent Strike Law, 26 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law & Social Change 1 (2023).

Blog Posts, Chapters, & Essays

Lives Housed Otherwise: Transgressing Liberal Property Logics, in Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, Property (2025) (with Lindsay Massara).

Organizing in the Shadow of the Law, Law & Political Economy Blog (2025).

All Power to the Tenants, Law & Political Economy Blog (2024).

Why Should Tenant Unions Look to Labor Law?, Law & Political Economy Blog (2023) (with Shakeer Rahman).