Law Professor Wins Inaugural Dean's Award for Scholarly Excellence

CAMDEN — The Rutgers School of Law–Camden has bestowed its inaugural Dean’s Award for Scholarly Excellence on Perry Dane, a professor of law.

The $1,500 award is given annually to a member of the Rutgers–Camden law faculty who enhances scholarly community and intellectual life of the School of Law. Dane is to use the money during the course of the next academic year to fund a lecture, to subsidize an academic workshop, or to bring in an outside speaker to one of his classes.

“Perry held a fellowship at New York University last year and during that time, he was very productive, writing on a range of issues including same-sex marriage, the relationship between choice of law and natural law theory, and Jewish law,” says John Oberdiek, a professor of law and director of faculty research at the Rutgers School of Law–Camden.

“These pieces share the traits of Perry's scholarship generally,” Oberdiek says. “They focus on fundamental questions, are the obvious product of deep thought, exhibit sensitivity to nuance and complexity, and are beautifully written.”

A former clerk for Justice William Brennan of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge David Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Dane has written landmark articles on choice of law, religion and law, the jurisprudence of Jewish law, legal pluralism, and jurisdiction.

“Receiving the inaugural Dean's Award for Scholarly Excellence is obviously gratifying personally,” Dane says. “I also like to think of the award as validating some of the scholarly interests and approaches to legal scholarship that my work happens to represent.”

Dane’s work covers a broad range of topics and he teaches courses in constitutional law, jurisdiction, conflict of laws, religion and law, and Jewish law.

“More broadly, whatever the topic, my work tends to emphasize tensions, contradictions, and difficulties rather than straightforward solutions,” he says. “In fact, I think that some problems are fundamentally intractable.  That's not to say that my work is purely theoretical.  To the contrary, much of what I have to say is very practical. For example, I hope that my writing about the same-sex marriage debate can help bridge the divide or at least clarify the issues for both sides.”

Dane continues, “Nevertheless, I do very much embrace a form of legal scholarship that is self-consciously very different from brief-writing.”

Dane is presently a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy and has been a member of the national seminar of the Project on Religious Institutions at Yale University’s Program on Non-Profit Organizations, a guest of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Israel, and a participant in a variety of scholarly conferences around the nation and the world.