The real-world impact of Rutgers Law faculty scholarship reaches far beyond the Camden and Newark campuses in New Jersey. Our faculty are engaging in research collaborations, presenting papers, organizing and speaking at international conferences, teaching and lecturing, and training future legal practitioners. Discover a glimpse of the international work our faculty are engaged in around the world.
- Vera Bergelson - Germany, Australia, United Kingdom
- Amy Bitterman - England
- Jorge Contesse - Brazil, Canada, Switzerland
- Sarah Dadush - Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom
- Matteo Gatti - Germany, Sweden
- Jonathan Gingerich - United Kingdom, Germany
- Joanne Gottesman - Austria
- Stuart Green - England
- Christina S. Ho - Portugal
- Thea Johnson - Germany
- Jootaek Lee - South Korea
- JC Lore - India
- Crescente Molina - Germany, England
- John Oberdiek - Poland
- Sarah Swan - Canada
- Alec Walen - Germany, England
Professor Vera Bergelson participated as a panelist in “The Otherness of the Defense of Others” at the “Theorizing Criminal Law” conference held at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg, Germany, in June 2024. In December 2023, she was also on the “Faulty State and Fair Punishment” panel at the “Voice, Resistance and Repair. Law and Living Together,” an annual conference of Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand held at the University of Technology Sydney Law School in Australia. The month prior, she was a panelist discussing “State Neglect and the Right to Sentence Mitigation” at the “State Misconduct as Sentence Mitigation” symposium held at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in November 2023.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Amy Bitterman gave a presentation on using defamiliarization techniques in Brief Writing at the 9th Applied Legal Storytelling Conference in London. The presentation was a condensed version of an article published in the Gonzaga Law Review, Vol. 57, “Taking the Blinders Off – Defamiliarization as a Persuasive Tool in Brief Writing.”
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Jorge Contesse presented the paper, “Latin American International Law” at the Latin American Society of International Law Bi-Annual Meeting, Universidad de São Paulo in Brazil in December 2023. The next month, he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in Canada. He taught a course on Current Challenges to Human Rights Law. This spring, Prof. Contesse examined six states as a Member of the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva. (Click here to view his remarks at 1:52:00) In April 2024, he was elected to the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law. Prof. Contesse is fluent in English, French, and Spanish.
Click here to return to the list.
In May, Professor Sarah Dadush was one of the experts invited to participate in an exploratory workshop held at the seat of UNIDROIT (the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law) in Rome. The workshop participants discussed the possibilities for creating a new UNIDROIT working group to work on corporate sustainability due diligence in global value chains and contracts.
This month, under her Responsible Contracting Project, she heads to Amsterdam to present at the Living Wage and Living Income Summit, organized by IDH "to make real strides toward living wages and living income in global value chains.” IDH and GIZ, with sponsorship from the UN Global Compact, will bring together over 400 key actors from the private and public sector, including producers, buyers, unions and more, to effect change through responsible business practices, policy instruments, and social dialogue.
Prof. Dadush is also presenting her paper, "Shared Responsibility in American Contact Law" at the KCON contracts conference being held in Bristol, UK, in June 2024. In addition, she provides expert commentary in the BBC World Service's documentary on the jasmine trade in Egypt. Click here to watch
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Matteo Gatti is a Senior Fellow at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Center for Advanced Studies-Foundations of Law and Finance, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. There, he lectured and presented “Corporate Governing” at the LawFin Seminar in October 2023. His paper examines the role of large American corporations in influencing and shaping critical societal issues, including racial equity, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate change efforts, through their political engagement and quasi-governmental actions. The same month, he also presented “Death by a Thousand Cuts: Hostile Bids in Europe, 2004-2023” at the European Company Law Experts workshop “Twenty Years of the Takeover Directive” in Stockholm, Sweden. This paper analyzes hostile takeovers in Europe twenty years after the passage of the E.U. Takeover Directive. Professor Gatti is fluent in Italian and has working knowledge of French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Click here to return to the list.
This month, Professor Jonathan Gingerich is co-organizing the second annual University of Southern California-King's College London-Rutgers University Legal Philosophy Workshop, which will be held at the King's College London Dickson Poon School of Law. Scholars from USC and King's will be presenting papers as will Rutgers Law professors Crescente Molina and Craig Agule. This event is co-sponsored by the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy. Also this month, Prof. Gingerich will present a paper titled "Kantian Genius Reconstructed" to the London Aesthetics Forum.
In addition, he organized a Symposium on Democracy, Speech, AI & Digital Platforms, hosted by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London School of Advanced Studies. At this symposium, he presented "Democratic Vibes" in December 2023 and again in April 2024 to the Edinburgh Legal Theory Research Group at Edinburgh Law School.
Moreover, Prof. Gingerich and Daniela Dover (Oxford) delivered their co-authored paper, "Freedom and Futurity: Simone de Beauvoir's Moral Psychology" at a variety of international meetings including the University of Oxford Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar in October 2023; the Bayreuth-Rotterdam Colloquium in Social and Political Philosophy on New Themes in Analytic Marxism at Universität Bayreuth in April 2024; the University of Glasgow Law and Philosophy Seminar in May 2024; the University of Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar in May 2024; and the International Conference of the Simone de Beauvoir Society at Freie Universität Berlin in June 2024.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Joanne Gottesman taught a course on U.S. Immigration Law and Policy at the University of Graz in Austria from May-June 2023 as part of a law school exchange. Her research focuses on the intersection between federal immigration law and state criminal justice and child welfare systems in the United States.
Click here to return to the list.
In fall 2023, Professor Stuart Green served as a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Oxford, where he co-taught a graduate seminar on “Criminal Law Theory: Homicide.” He also served as Visiting Fellow – Exeter College, University of Oxford during the same semester. Professor Green gave select lectures on sexual offenses in Oxford's first-year Criminal Law course. In addition, he presented the paper titled, “The Homicide Exception to Four Criminal Law Defenses: Consent, Necessity, Duress, and Statute of Limitations” at the Cambridge Centre for Penal Theory and EthicsSurrey Centre for Law and Philosophy; and Oxford Criminal Law Discussion Group.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Christina S. Ho presented “Reinsurance as a Human Right” in July 2023 at the “First International Conference of the Jean Monnet Module EU Insurance Law: Challenges in the SDG era” in Lisbon, Portugal. The policy implications of her participation starts from overall support for the broad view of sustainable development that centers on milestones of health and well-being instead of GDP or per capita income metrics. Prof. Ho is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Thea Johnson spoke in Berlin, Germany, in September 2023 at Humboldt University, Faculty of Law. Her talk, “Everything But the Truth: Thinking about Lying, Fictions and Half-Truths in the U.S. Criminal Justice System” focused on fictions, lying and half-truths in the U.S. criminal system. It was an opportunity for comparative exchange about the criminal justice system in both countries.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Jootaek Lee presented the paper, “The Human Right to Development: Definition, Research and Annotated Bibliography” at the conference of the Korean Society of International Law in Seoul, South Korea, in October 2023. The paper was also published in the International Journal of Legal Information. Considering a wide variety of international instruments and literature, the article attempts to provide a comprehensive and consistent definition of the human right to development and its relationship to the human right to health and intellectual property. Prof. Lee is fluent in Korean.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor JC Lore (back row center)
Professor JC Lore traveled to India last summer to train children’s rights lawyers and law faculty at the National Law University Delhi. This partnership with National Institute for Trial Advocacy (NITA), Baker and McKenzie, The Global Initiative on Justice with Children, and many others laid the groundwork for improving the rights and representation of children throughout India. Prof. Lore hopes to return to India as a Fulbright Specialist in the near future to continue his work.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Crescente Molina presented the paper, “The Conceptual Foundations of Contract Formation” at the “Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law” Conference held at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany in August 2023. He will present the same article this month at the Oxford Obligations Discussion Group at the University of Oxford. In this paper, he offers a novel theoretical model for analyzing the basic notions that underlie the process of contract formation. Prof. Molina will also present the paper, “Self-executing Transactions and the Assurance Problem” at the Rutgers/King's College London/USC Law & Philosophy conference this month at King's College London. In this paper, he provides an account of the structure of self-executing transactions and analyze their potential to undermine the foundations of our promise-keeping culture.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor John Oberdiek is presenting a paper this month at the “Wronging and Making Right: The Morality of Law of Remedial Practices” Conference at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Hosted by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics, the conference brings together some of the world’s leading moral philosophers and legal scholars.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Sarah Swan presented at the Tort Law & Social Equality Speaker Series, hosted by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in March 2024. (Click here to watch) Her paper, “The Plaintiff Police” is forthcoming in The Yale Law Journal. It explores the recent trend of local police officers increasingly bringing civil lawsuits against those that they police.
Click here to return to the list.
Professor Alec Walen commented on a paper on the purposes of punishment at the annual meeting of the Core Concepts in Criminal Law and Justice in Marburg, Germany in October 2023. He then presented his paper “The Limits of Culpability: Why the Criminal Justice System Needs a Complementary Foundation in Fair Forfeiture” at the Max Plank Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law in Freiburg, Germany. He also participated in a workshop on his forthcoming book, Punishment, Penalty, and Incapacitation, at Surrey Center for Law and Philosophy, in London, England, in March 2024.
Click here to return to the list.