NJ Biz reports
The bulk of a multimillion-dollar donation to Rutgers Law School will be used to revive and expand a women’s rights litigation clinic founded in the early 1970s by late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In announcing receipt of the $6.5 million gift from the Stephanie and Harold Krieger Charitable Trust – the second largest donation in the law school’s history – Rutgers plans to put $5.5 million of it toward reestablishing the facility at its Newark campus, as well as launching one on the grounds of its school in Camden.
Slated to open in 2025, the clinic’s mission will revolve around advancing gender equity through direct representation, impact litigation and legislative work and educating a new generation of students to continue the fight for gender equity while expanding the reach of Rutgers’ nationally ranked clinical programs, according to the school.
A trailblazer for women’s rights and revered champion of civil rights, Ginsburg served on the Supreme Court from 1993 until 2020, when she passed away at the age of 87, due to complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer.
During the Oct. 16 announcement, which was made in Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hall – a 17-story landmark residence building renamed in her honor three years ago – Rutgers-Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor described Ginsburg as a “shero who changed the face of history” that “is and will always be very special to us.”
“I and many college and university professors across the nation have been thinking a lot about Justice Ginsburg lately in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decisions that threaten to undo so much of the progress we’ve made thanks to her,” Cantor remarked.
“Despite the odds stacked against us in the national debate … we must keep going,” said Cantor, who added that Rutgers is committed to educating the next diverse generation of “future RBGs.”
“We have to do it all together. We have amazing leaders to look to … and we have to maintain what she started for us all,” she added.
Cantor went on to say, “Standing here, in a building named for our beloved Justice Ginsburg, on a campus where she herself found inspiration, I find inspiration, too; to keep fighting for justice with our faculty, our staff, our students who are incredibly inspiring in their own right.”
Decades before becoming the second woman on the nation’s highest court, the Brooklyn, N.Y., native began her legal career in 1963 as a professor at Rutgers, where Ginsburg said female law students sparked her interest in fighting for gender equality.
Ginsburg – who was one of only two women law professors at Rutgers and one of just a handful in the nation – led a seminar on women and the law during her nine years at the law school. She was also the founding faculty advisor for The Women’s Rights Law Reporter, which is now the oldest legal periodical in the U.S. focusing exclusively on the field of women’s rights.
Established when Ginsburg was a professor at the law school, the Rutgers-Newark Women’s Rights Litigation Clinic not only trained lawyers to critically understand the needs of women, but also to support strategic litigation that aimed to reform law.
At the time, clinical education was becoming popular, with programs designed to give students a way to learn while they addressed important societal needs. In response to calls from female students to establish such an offering that specifically addressed women’s needs, Rutgers began the women’s rights litigation clinic on an experimental basis in the fall of 1972 and soon after made it a full-time addition to the curriculum.
According to Rutgers Law School Dean Johanna Bond, the program went on to accomplish “groundbreaking law reform until it ceased operation in the early 2000s.”
Some of the clinic’s original work included:
- Sexual harassment: Tomkins v. PSEG Co., which developed the early jurisprudence of “quid pro quo” sexual harassment; other litigation advanced sexual harassment claims against an educational institution and achieved the first recognition of “hostile work environment” sexual harassment;
- Public benefits: initiated Califano v. Goldfarb, which Ginsburg argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, invalidating unequal survivors’ benefits in the Social Security Act;
- Family Law: Egner v. Egner, which established a women’s right to use her own surname after marriage;
- Public accommodations: Frank v. Ivy Club, which ended sex discrimination at male-only “eating clubs” at Princeton University.
Additionally, the clinic addressed reproductive rights by helping to enact regulations limiting sterilization abuse of poor and marginalized women, according to Rutgers.
Elizabeth Langer, who earned a law degree from Rutgers in 1973, described Ginsburg as not only a teacher, but a much-needed role model and “anchor during a time when we needed support.”
“She gave us strength to pursue a mission: making the world a better place by serving those who have been marginalized,” said Langer, who co-founded WRLR and served as the publication’s first editor-in-chief.
When Ginsburg left Rutgers in 1972 to join Columbia Law School’s faculty as its first tenured female professor, she was already a nationally recognized scholar and civil rights advocate. Eight years later, Ginsburg was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton named her to the Supreme Court.
Following Ginsburg’s death, Rutgers began planning to bring back the clinic as a way to honor her legacy of women’s rights and gender justice work. While neither the physical space nor the number of faculty and students assigned to the clinics has been determined, a spokesperson said both facilities will be located inside existing buildings on campus.
The newly announced gift also creates The Stephanie and Harold Krieger Memorial Endowed Scholarship with a $1 million endowment, which will provide scholarships for three law students in Newark with preference given to first-generation college students in good academic standing who have demonstrated financial need.
A 1929 graduate from New Jersey Law School, the predecessor of Rutgers Law, Harold Kreiger had an active practice that spanned labor law, workers compensation, criminal law and municipal law. During his 60-plus years of private and public practice in Jersey City, he served as municipal judge, assistant corporation counsel, counsel to the Redevelopment Agency and the Parking Authority, and Hudson County counsel. In later years, he was commissioner of the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission.
According to Rutgers, Krieger’s will provided that upon passing of his wife, Stephanie, a charitable trust would be created and directed by Brett Harwood, a longtime family friend named as a trustee. Before Stephanie’s death in July 2023, Harwood received her full endorsement of the new clinic’s founding and scholarship fund, the law school said.
“We’re creating the funds to create a long-lasting legacy to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and it pleases me very, very much to be able to facilitate this,” said Harwood, who added, “The fight goes on. The legacy goes on.”
News of the donation came as the U.S. Postal Service held a formal unveiling of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg stamp, a ceremony that drew nearly 200 people to the Rutgers-Newark campus. In addition to students from Barringer, Central and University high schools in Newark, Ginsburg’s granddaughter, Clara Spera, was also on hand to celebrate the first solo stamp issue in two decades of a Supreme Court Justice.
Spera, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, commented, “This stamp is an especially meaningful tribute to my grandmother for many reasons. She joins the ranks of other justices she revered, like Thurgood Marshall, and other path-marking civil rights advocates like Ella Baker and women’s rights pioneers like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”
