Professor Baltz is the co-director of the Housing Justice & Tenant Solidarity Clinic, where law students learn to strategically employ the law in support of housing justice organizing.
His primary scholarly interests are in the fields of access to justice, law and social movements, and property law. His empirical scholarship focuses on the justice gaps in our courts and agencies as well as the regulatory structures that govern housing markets. His work investigates how the law informs, facilitates, and undermines organizing strategies employed by housing justice movements.
Professor Baltz joined Rutgers from NYU School of Law, where he was a legal fellow at the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy and supervised students from both the Anti-Displacement Practice Area of CUNY’s Community & Economic Development Clinic and Columbia Law School’s Law, Power, and Social Change Externship. Previously, he worked as a tenants' rights attorney at TakeRoot Justice (formerly the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center), where he collaborated with tenant organizers and represented New York City-based tenant unions in rent strikes, repair and anti-harassment litigation, and legislative advocacy. Professor Baltz 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.
He is a graduate of the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Harvard Law School, where he was active with both the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and Project No One Leaves. 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 & Justice in Boyle Heights.