Legal Career Center

Position Summary:

Rutgers University School of Law, is seeking a staff attorney for the newly-created Pratt Criminal and Youth Justice Transparency Project. The Project seeks to collect and disseminate information about New Jersey's youth and adult justice systems, particularly its correctional systems. This is a time-limited twelve -month position with no teaching or student supervision responsibilities.

The Project's primary aim is to shed light on systemic problems that are difficult to identify without comprehensive data, especially racial disparities by 1) Identify publicly-available criminal and youth justice data and information by researching digital and other sources and consulting with criminal and juvenile justice stakeholders and advocates and map existing data and information sources; 2) Identify barriers to transparency and provide policy analysis and recommendations with a view toward drafting model criminal and youth justice transparency policies and/or proposed legislation; 3) Develop and implement data- and information-gathering strategies, including records requests pursuant to the New Jersey Open Public Records Act and other mechanisms; 4) Create and manage system for tracking public records requests for data and information in addition to create and manage internal database and supervise the storage of the data and information acquired; and with Rutgers IT and communications staff, create and maintain publicly-accessible web site providing access to information acquired; 5) Identify potential litigation when access to records has been denied and litigate as necessary, with support from supervising clinical faculty and possible involvement of clinic students; and draft and/or comment on proposed legislation and/or regulations; and 6) Working collaboratively with supervising clinical faculty, create and publish a criminal and youth justice transparency