Ruth Anne Robbins teaches courses across the lawyering curriculum, including Persuasion in Legal Writing, Legislative & Policy Drafting, and the LAWR series. She has created and taught several courses in the curriculum including Persuasion in Legal Writing, the Domestic Violence Clinic, and Advanced Legal Writing. She also reimagined and redesigned the Hunter Program to its current iteration, with its roots in the Persuasion course. Professor Robbins has received The Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching and The Chancellor's Teaching Excellence Award. She has also been honored by the Women's Law Caucus, and has been selected by graduating students as Lawyering Professor of the Year. She was selected for a campus Digital Teaching Fellowship for the 2016-17 Academic Year. The New Jersey Law Journal named her a top-25 New Jersey Women in Law in its inaugural event, in 2016.
Robbins co-authors a 1L textbook about client-centered effective legal writing focusing on legal narrative as a fundamental element. She co-authored two sections of Building Best Practices--a book about experiential legal education--published by the Clinical Legal Education Association. She has written about New Jersey domestic violence law practice and procedure, most recently about the need for a right to an attorney in restraining order hearings. The body of her other work focuses on persuasion theory in two specific areas: applied legal storytelling, and visual design in legal documents. One of her document design articles appeared by invitation on the website of the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit from 2004 through 2016.
Nationally, she has served as co-editor in chief of the peer-edited journal, Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD, publishing articles about lawyering for a practitioner audience. She is the co-founder of the international biennial conference series, Applied Legal Storytelling. Professor Robbins served as the President of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI), from 2008–10, and served on the Board of Directors from 2004 through 2016. She regularly presents at national conferences, CLEs, and workshops. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, she was an associate at Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis in Philadelphia, and at Eisenberg, Gold & Cettei in South Jersey. She clerked for a presiding judge of the New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Division, the Hon. Michael Patrick King, P.J.A.D. She has a B.A. in biology from the University of Pennsylvania and was a Westinghouse Science Scholar for her laboratory work. She earned her J.D. magna cum laude from Rutgers and was the first recipient of the Deborah Michael Richards Award in family law.
Note: As part of the faculty’s vote to transition to a more equitable unitary tenure track, several clinical professors have seen a recent title change as they move to the tenure track from the clinical track (a non-tenure track series). Counter-intuitive though this may seem, the title change is part of the process of a status upgrade. In the clinical series Professor Robbins earned the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Law, and now holds the title Professor of Law.