Professor of Law and Justice Frederick W. Hall Scholar (on leave 2007-08). (Property; Trusts and Estates; Employment Discrimination; 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, N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change, the U.C. Davis Law Review, and other publications. Professor Hernandez is a senior editor for the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. and an editorial board member 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's foreign language skills include Spanish, Portuguese, and French.