Credit: Nick Romanenko

From left, students Sandeep Chhabra, Ben West, Denise Letrendre, Associate Professor Lisa L. Miller, student Sujata Rajpurohit, and Rutgers alumnus John W. Adams.

John W. Adams worked for two decades as president of an investment firm, but always harbored scholarly interests beyond finance.

One subject that he finds particularly compelling is the role of law in society. “Law has really been my window to look at the world and to understand how it works,”  the 1965 Rutgers College graduate said.

Now Adams, having left finance for academia, is providing a group of Rutgers undergraduates with an unusual opportunity to share the view from that window.

On June 28, six students majoring in political science will fly to England for an intensive, two-week fellowship at the University of Oxford that will bring them face to face with leading scholars and law faculty while exposing them to topics ranging from the workings of the British legal system, to the role of international courts, to crime and criminology.

The fellowship is being underwritten by the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society, an Oxford-affiliated group founded by Adams after he left the investment firm in 2004.
“Undergraduate students were the perfect audience for what we are trying to do with this fellowship – they’re open to thinking about other ideas and in need of a better understanding of the world,” said Adams, who is also a part-time lecturer at the Department of Political Science.

Rutgers students who take Adams’ seminar – “The Role of Courts in a Democratic Society” – are already familiar with his ability to stretch their critical thinking skills.

Sujata Rajpurohit, one of the fellows, said that during a class exercise she had to mount a case for John Yoo, the Bush administration attorney who helped provide the legal foundation for the use of brutal interrogation techniques on detainees.

Undergraduates were the perfect audience for what we are trying to do with this fellowship – John W. Adams

“It was a great hypothetical exercise because it was a case I thought I would never argue in my life,” she said. “It gives you an idea of what goes on in an attorney’s head.”

The fellows were chosen on the basis of their academic record, an interview, faculty recommendations, and an essay in which they had to focus on the balancing of civil liberties with national security. Those selected for the fellowship along with Rajpurohit are Aungar Chatterjee, Sandeep Chhabra, Denise Letendre, Vanessa Vander Wilt and Ben West.

“It was a pretty grueling process. We had a terrific pool of applicants,” said Lisa L. Miller, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, who will accompany the students to Oxford and serve on the fellowship’s faculty.

“These kids really stood out,” she added. “They were particularly well prepared, very engaged and grounded in their work.”

The students said they’re still feeling stunned by the prospect of studying at Oxford.

The fellowship promises to be a rich academic experience that’s more typical of graduate school.

“The [faculty] we will be working with is the highest caliber you can get,” Vander Wilt said. “For undergraduates to have access to them is incredible.”

Letendre said the fellowship will be her first time studying abroad.

“I have never been out of the country before,” she said. “I’ve never known the views of other countries other than what I heard filtered through the American media.”

For Ben West, one of the attractions is having the ability to focus solely on academics, with no distractions. West took five classes during the spring semester, while serving in the student assembly, working a part-time job at the Rutgers University Foundation, and handling an internship at Governor Jon Corzine’s office in Trenton.

The Rutgers group will be joined by students from Oxford University, Kenyon College in Ohio, and the Central European University in Budapest.

Each day, the 16 fellows will attend lectures and seminars delivered by a faculty that includes Miller; Denis Galligan, professor of socio-legal studies at Oxford; and a range of other professors, research fellows, and political scientists.

Miller said the fellowship also will help students finalize the topic for an honors thesis that will be completed over the next academic year.

“Not only do they have an opportunity to study at this globally renowned institution, but they come back and stay with the process by selecting a topic that will enhance their understanding,” Miller said. “The combination is pretty exciting.” 

For Adams, the fellowship brings him full circle. After working for 15 years as a lawyer in a New Jersey firm, he served as president for 20 years of a New York investment firm, the Smith Management Company. But in 2004 he changed directions, leaving the firm and founding the foundation.

The change was fueled by his fascination with the law.

“It was observing how markets work in the financial world that caused me to realize how important and significant a role that law plays in people’s lives,” he said.