Professor of Law and Justice Frederick W. Hall Scholar. (Property;
Trusts and Estates; Race and the Law.) Professor Hernandez earned an
A.B. in sociology from Brown in 1986 and a J.D. in 1990 from Yale Law
School, where she was note topics editor of the Yale Law Journal
and chair of the Northeast Black Law Students` Association Moot Court.
She clerked for U.S. District Judge Jaime P. Pieras, Jr., in Puerto
Rico from 1990 to 1992, then received a fellowship to the Center for
Reproductive Law and Policy in New York, where she litigated challenges
to women`s health care restrictions and clinic violence. Thereafter,
she worked as a staff attorney for the HIV unit of Brooklyn Legal
Services. Prior to joining the Rutgers-Newark faculty in September
2001, she had been a professor of law at St. John`s University School
of Law, an intersession professor of law at the University of Puerto
Rico Law School, and a visiting professor of law at Brooklyn Law School
and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her scholarly interest
is in the study of comparative race relations, and her work in that
area has been published in the Cornell Law Review, Yale Law & Policy Review, UC Berkeley California Law Review, NYU Review of Law & Social Change,
the UC Davis Law Review, and other publications. Professor Hernandez is
a senior editor for the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Latino/a History and Culture and an editorial board mem-ber for the Latino Studies Journal.
In fall 2003, she served as a Scholar-in-Residence/Independent Scholar
at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Professor
Hernandez speaks Spanish, Portuguese, and French.