Ruth Anne Robbins

Professor Robbins teaches courses across the lawyering curriculum. She has created 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. Professor Robbins has received the Chancellor's Teaching Excellence Award, has 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 2016-1207 academic year. 

Robbins coauthors a 1L textbook about persuasive legal writing that is client-centered rather than document-centered in approach. She coauthored two sections of Building Best Practices--a book about experiential legal education--published by the Clinical Legal Education Association. She has also coauthored the practitioner treatise on New Jersey Domestic Violence Practice and Procedure. Her most recent scholarship focuses on the process of choosing portraits for our paper currency. The body of her other work has focused on persuasion theory in two areas: first, legal rhetoric--specifically storytelling/narrative and visual design in legal documents; and second, on the civil right to counsel in domestic violence cases. 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 April 2016. 

Nationally, she serves as coeditor in chief of the peer-edited journal, Legal Communication and Rhetoric: JALWD, publishing articles about lawyering for a practitioner audience. She is the cofounder of the international biennial conference series, Applied Legal Storytelling. Professor Robbins served as the president of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI), from 2008-2010, and served on the board of directors from 2004 through 2016. She has also served on other national committees for experiential education. She regularly presents at national conferences, CLEs, and workshops. The New Jersey Law Journal named her a top-25 New Jersey Women in Law in its inaugural event in 2016. 

Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, Professor Robbins 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.