Professor Baltz is the 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 also investigates how the law informs, facilitates, and undermines community organizing strategies. His recent scholarship is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law & Social Change.
Professor Baltz joins Rutgers from NYU School of Law, where he was a legal fellow at the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy and worked with 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. Prior to law school, he lived and worked in Annunciation House, a migrant shelter on the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.