Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor, Professor of Law, and Justice Frederick W. Hall Scholar. (Land Use; Constitutional Law; Torts; Current Supreme Court Term Seminar.) Professor Payne received his B.A. from Yale and his J.D. from Harvard. He has been on the Rutgers faculty since 1971, and served as associate dean from 1976 to 1981 and from 1986 to 1991. For more than 20 years he has been the key participant in the Mount Laurel cases, which have established the requirement that growing suburban communities include provisions for low and moderate income housing in their zoning regulations. His nationally recognized Mount Laurel work has helped stimulate new approaches to housing opportunity, looking to a world in which decent shelter is considered a fundamental right.

Professor Payne also has been a driving force for historic preservation in New Jersey and critical to protecting the work and legacy of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Until the middle of 2003, he was the president of the national Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and he has also served as a director of Preservation New Jersey, the New Jersey partner of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He has lectured about Frank Lloyd Wright around the United States and as far away as Japan.

As an academic, Professor Payne has written and lectured extensively. He has published at least 15 articles on housing and historic preservation issues, in addition to his Mount Laurel writing, as well as coediting one of the most highly respected and widely used casebooks on land development and land law (Planning and Control of Land Development, 5th ed., 2001, with Daniel Mandelker).