Rutgers Law Celebrates Distinguished Faculty for Decades of Legal Impact
Three long-serving faculty members at Rutgers Law are retiring this year. These scholars have shaped legal education through decades of teaching, groundbreaking scholarship, and legal practice that has influenced U.S. and international law. We celebrate the extraordinary achievements of Distinguished Professors of Law John Leubsdorf and Beth Stephens. Professor of Law Allan Stein is also retiring after this academic year.
John Leubsdorf, Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Judge Frederick B. Lacey Scholar, has been part of the Rutgers Law faculty in Newark for 40 years. He previously helped desegregate the Boston public schools as a partner at a large Boston law firm as well as participated in other public interest and commercial litigation. His areas of expertise include Civil Procedure, Professional Responsibility, Evidence, Law and Literature, and U.S. Legal Thought. The former Fulbright scholar has written books about French Legal Ethics and American Civil Procedure and many articles. He was associate reporter for the Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers. Professor Leubsdorf was also the reporter for two American Bar Association Committees and served on two New Jersey Supreme Court Committees and on the Professional Ethics Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.
He has taught at several top law schools and is a life member of the American Law Institute. Looking back on his teaching career at Rutgers, he prizes most the opportunity to teach students from a variety of economic and cultural backgrounds and to work with colleagues distinguished both by their scholarship and by their devotion to the public interest.
A faculty member since 1996, Distinguished Professor of Law Beth Stephens has taught in both the Camden and Newark locations. She taught Civil Procedure and an assortment of human rights and foreign relations courses as well as a practicum at Camden in which students worked with her on human rights litigation. Her scholarship focused on the relationship between international and domestic law, including the enforcement of international human rights norms through domestic courts. She was an Advisor to the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. Professor Stephens also wrote about business and human rights and served as a legal consultant to a network of human rights groups formulating proposals for a new treaty on business and human rights.
She represented Rutgers Law student Brisa De Angulo ’12, a rape survivor and fierce advocate for child victims of sexual abuse, in a groundbreaking case against the state of Bolivia that led to a legal victory in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Though a law firm took over most of the legal work during the last several years of this groundbreaking case, Professor Stephens worked on the case with law students in a human rights “mini clinic” in Camden. Professor Stephens was featured in a 2024 documentary chronicling DeAngulo’s story.
As a cooperating attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights—where she worked before joining the Rutgers faculty—Professor Stephens continues to litigate human rights cases including Mamani v. Berzain, a lawsuit against the former president of Bolivia for the killing of civilians by troops under his command.
Professor of Law Allan Stein is also retiring this year. He taught civil procedure, federal courts and litigation. Professor Stein is the author of major civil procedure articles in the Texas, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale law reviews and is a co-author of a Civil Procedure casebook. An honors graduate of Haverford College and of New York University School of Law, where he was a member of the Order of the Coif, he was reporter to the American College of Trial Lawyers Project on Mass Torts.