Rutgers School of Law-Newark is located on the Newark Campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The campus is situated in the heart of Newark's cultural center, close to the Newark Public Library, the Newark Museum, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The social, cultural, professional, and educational opportunities of the Newark/New York City area combine to provide a fitting location for the study of law. Newark is the largest city in New Jersey and the second largest in the New York metropolitan area, with a population of approximately 275,000. It is eight miles west of New York City and 90 miles northeast of Philadelphia.

Qualities that typify Rutgers School of Law-Newark include its outstanding legal education, nationally recognized faculty, very diverse student body, commitment to public service, and reasonably-priced tuition. Of approximately 800 students in both day and evening programs, about 40 percent are women and 41 percent are students of color. The majority of students are New Jersey residents, but students hail from all parts of the country and have earned undergraduate degrees from more than 120 different colleges and universities. The excellence and diversity of Rutgers School of Law-Newark students is reflected in their varied professional interests, goals, and outlooks, making classroom discussion and other law school interactions dynamic and educationally stimulating. The faculty is as diverse as the student body and brings to the classroom their experiences as nationally recognized experts in a multitude of legal areas ranging from corporate law to public interest law.

Faculty scholarship and extracurricular service are well known and respected in the legal community, as well as in the academic legal community. As a result, Rutgers School of Law-Newark was awarded the first New Jersey chapter of the Order of the Coif, the national honor society for law students.

The oldest law school in the state, the School of Law-Newark has had many ancestors and locales. It began in 1908 in an imposing Victorian townhouse as a proprietary institution, the New Jersey Law School. Its business-oriented curriculum quickly attracted many students, and by the 1920s it had become the nation's second-largest law school. In 1927, it moved to a former brewery at 40 Rector Street. In 1936 the school joined with with another private institution, the Mercer Beasley Law School, to become the University of Newark Law School.

In 1946, the entire University of Newark was absorbed by Rutgers University, and Rutgers School of Law-Newark was officially born. The new affiliation brought great advantages through the university's substantial resources and prestige. Over the next several decades, the school became an institution of national stature. Its library expanded to become the most comprehensive collection in New Jersey, and its faculty tripled in size. In the 1960s, the law school pioneered in developing clinical education and in providing the opportunity to study law to women and minority groups. In 1967, the School of Law in Camden, which had been administered by the dean of the law school in Newark, was created as a separate unit of the university, and the university's original law school became the School of Law-Newark. After outgrowing several buildings in downtown Newark, it moved in 1978 to the skyscraper that became the S.I. Newhouse Center for Law and Justice. In January 2000, the law school moved to the new 225,000-square-foot S.I. Newhouse Center for Law and Justice, located at the corner of Washington and New Streets.