Ruth Anne Robbins
Professor of Law
Ruth Anne Robbins, professor of law, is a national expert in the field of legal communication and advocacy. She has held leadership roles nationally. She has created several courses across our lawyering curriculum including the Hunter program, advanced writing courses, and two clinics. Currently, she works with students on New Jersey legislation. Her scholarship focuses mostly on legal narrative and legal document design. She has received several campus-wide, regional, and national awards for her teaching and innovation.
Biography
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.
Publications
Fiction 102: Create a Portal for Story Immersion (answering some of the why/how of persuading with story), 18 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric: JALWD 27 (Fall, 2021).
Persistent Structural Barriers to Gender Equity in the Legal Academy and the Efforts of Two Legal Writing Organizations to Break Them Down (with Kristen K. Tiscione and Melissa H. Weresh), Villanova L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2020).
Your Client's Story: Persuasive Legal Writing, 2d ed. (with Steve Johansen and Ken Chestek) (Wolters Kluwer L. & Bus. 2019)(textbook).
Beyond #TheNew10—The Case for a Citizens Currency Advisory Committee, 69 Rutgers L. Rev. 195 (2016) (with Genevieve Tung). http://www.rutgerslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Genevieve-B.-Tung-Ruth-Anne-Robbins-Beyond-TheNew10-69-Rutgers-UL-Rev-195-2016.pdf
Three 3Ls, Kairos, and the Civil Right to Counsel in Domestic Violence Cases, 2015 State U. L. Rev. 1359 (Part of the Symposium, Persuasion in Civil Rights Advocacy).http://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/lr/vol2015/iss4/5/
95 Years of Waiting for a Woman on Paper Currency, Women You Should Know (January 28, 2016) (with Genevieve Tung),http://www.womenyoushouldknow.net/95-years-of-waiting-for-a-woman-on-paper-currency/
Writing the Client Into the Argument: Image Decision, Word-Choice Precision, LegalED Pedagogy Series (filmed March 2015, American University, Washington College of Law). https://vimeo.com/141592267
Art-iculating the Analysis: Visuals as Legal Reasoning, (with Steven J. Johansen) 20 Legal Writing 57 (2015). available athttp://www.legalwritingjournal.org/2015/07/05/art-iculating-the-analysis-systemizing-the-decision-to-use-visuals-as-legal-reasoning/
Revisiting the Traditional Foundational Legal Skills of Analysis, Research, and Communication (with Kristen K. Tiscione and Amy Sloan), in Building on Best Practices & Carnegie’s Educating Lawyers: Legal Education in a Changing World(Maranville, Sedillo Lopez, Bliss, & Kaas, eds., 2015).
Your Client's Story: Persuasive Legal Writing (with Steve Johansen and Ken Chestek) (Wolters Kluwer L. & Bus. 2013)(textbook).
Finding Perspective in the Institution, The Second Draft 20–23 (Fall 2015), at http://lwionline.org/uploads/FileUpload/F2015SecondDraftMobile.pdf (as part of written legal storytelling offering a method for locating and presenting the perspectives of an institutional client).
A Cautionary Tale Showing the Need for Civil Right to Counsel in Domestic Violence Cases, Rutgers Journal of Law & Public Policy Blog (with Brian J. Foley) (October 15, 2015), at http://rutgerspolicyjournal.org/cautionary-tale-showing-need-civil-right-counsel-domestic-violence-cases
Harry Potter as Client in a Lawsuit, Chapter in The Law & Harry Potter (Jeffrey E. Thomas & Franklin G. Snyder, eds., Carolina Acad. Press 2010).
Conserving the Canvas: Reducing the Environmental Footprint of Legal Briefs by Re-Imagining Court Rules and Legal Briefs, 7 J. ALWD 193 (2010).
New Jersey Domestic Violence Practice and Procedure 3d ed. (with the Hon. A. DiCamillo and M.A. Abatemarco) (N.J. Inst. of CLE 2009) (practitioner treatise). *2d edition published in 2005 and 1st edition published in 2002.
An Introduction to Applied Storytelling, 14 J. Legal Writing 3 (2008).
Harry Potter, Ruby Slippers and Merlin: Telling the Client's Story Using the Characters and Paradigm of the Archetypal Hero's Journey, 29 No. 4 Seattle L. Rev. 767 (2006)(lead article).
Painting with Print: Incorporating concepts of typographic and layout design into the text of legal writing documents, 2 J. ALWD 108 (2004); reproduced on the website of the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals from October 2004 through April 2016.
Creating New Learning Experiences Through Collaborations Between Law Librarians and Legal Writing Faculty (with Susan A. King), 11 No. 3 Perspectives 110 (Spring 2003).
Fiction 101: A Primer for Lawyers On How To Use Fiction Writing Techniques To Write Persuasive Facts Sections (with Brian Foley), 32, No. 2, Rutgers L.J. 459 (Winter, 2001).
*Reprinted in 51 No. 1 Defense L.J. 149 (Spring 2002)
Various shorter pieces appear in multiple issues of The Second Draft, available athttp://www.lwionline.org and include President's Columns (between 2008-10) and The Next Step #1 Starting a Dialogue About Upper Level Writing (beginning of a regular column). Other shorter pieces appear in various newsletters, and Op-Eds.