Professor Baltz teaches and writes about the tenant movement. 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 to employ the law to support community organizations to build leadership, capacity, and power, including through litigation on behalf of tenant associations.
Professor Baltz joined Rutgers 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 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, tenant-initiated receivership actions, landlord bankruptcies, and legislative advocacy. He was also a member of UAW NOLSW Local 2320 and served on the bargaining 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.
He is a graduate of Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Harvard Law School, where he was active with 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.