Meet Rutgers Law Visiting Professor Yolanda Vázquez

Yolanda Vázquez is teaching Property as this year’s Paul A. Rudino Visiting Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School in Newark. She is on leave from the University of Cincinnati College of Law where she teaches criminal procedure, property, immigration, and “crimmigration” (the intersection of criminal law and immigration law.)

“My time at Rutgers has been a thoroughly engaging experience,” she said. “The level of commitment for social change by students, staff, and faculty on issues impacting vulnerable populations can be seen throughout the institution – in the classroom, in scholarship, and in the variety of workshops and conferences that are constantly happening at Rutgers. It is my great honor to be a part of it while serving as the Peter W. Rodino Visiting Professor of Law.”

Her research explores the way in which migration policies are reshaping the U.S. criminal system, including its disproportionate impact on Latinos. She is currently working on her book, Crime, Immigration, and Racial Subordination (under contract with Routledge Press), which discusses how and why crime and migration policies are used as a mechanism of racial subordination in the United States. She is co-editor of the 2018 book, Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging: Race, Criminal Justice and Migration Control (Oxford University Press). She also serves as an Academic Researcher for the University of Oxford’s Border Criminologies. 

Professor Vázquez has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Villanova University School of Law, and the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. She has also held visiting appointments at the Migration Policy Centre of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, the University of Oxford, England, the University of Houston Law Center, and King’s College London.

Prior to joining the academic world, Professor Vázquez was a criminal and civil litigator. She was a public defender in the Cook County Public Defender’s Office in Chicago and the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. She was a civil litigator at Camden Regional Legal Services and Legal Services of New Jersey. She was awarded the Jack Wasserman Memorial Award for Excellence in Litigation in the Field of Immigration law for her work on Padilla v. Kentucky.

This visiting professorship is named after Rutgers Law alumnus and Congressman Peter W. Rodino Jr., D-N.J. He became well known in the 1970s during the Watergate scandal for his relentless pursuit of justice as chair of the House Judiciary Committee assigned to investigate articles of impeachment against then-President Richard Nixon for violating the U.S. Constitution.