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Adjunct Professor Rutgers School of Law - Camden 217 North Fifth Street Camden, NJ 08102
F: (856) 225-6516
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Biography
A 1985 graduate of Brooklyn Law School, Bruce Afran also holds a degree in history from the State University of New York at Binghamton where he graduated in 1982.
Since 1986 he has been one of New Jersey’s leading civil rights and constitutional lawyers, figuring prominently in cases concerning civil rights, corporate fraud, election reform, immigrant rights and family law. Since 2001, he has been adjunct professor of law at Rutgers University School of Law in Camden where he teaches civil rights, civil liberties and First Amendment law. He regularly consults on matters involving international human rights law, pensions and securities law and has argued cases in many states including New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington, D.C., South Carolina and Florida and is a national elections counsel to former presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
A leading public figure in New Jersey, he is a sought-after speaker at forums throughout the state on a wide variety of issues, including civil liberties and civil rights, the environment, middle-eastern affairs and government. As a constitutional lawyer, he has achieved major changes in New Jersey laws that have affected the lives of thousands of residents of this State.
Recently, he came to prominence as one of two lawyers arguing for a special election in New Jersey to replace resigning Governor James E. McGreevy. In one of the longest oral arguments recorded before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Afran and co-counsel Carl Mayer argued that the substance of McGreevy’s departure from office created a vacancy under the New Jersey constitution that should be filled by election. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the case garnered nationwide attention and renewed focus on the primacy of voting rights.
As an environmental lawyer, Prof. Afran came again to prominence in a litigation that challenged the right of New Jersey municipalities to engage in large-scale commercial deer harvesting. This series of litigation has resulted in the virtual cessation of commercial deer harvests in New Jersey.
In the field of family law, Professor Afran in the 1995 case of Pascale v. Pascale achieved the judicial recognition of non-custodial parents’ rights to retain child support funds to spend directly on children, an innovation never before implemented in the United States and which expanded the rights and participation of non-custodial parents in their children’s lives.
Prof. Afran’s work has also resulted in the elimination of race-based adoption in New Jersey, a practice that left thousands of African American children without permanent adoption placements for years on end. As a result of the first federal action in the United States seeking damages for adoption delays caused by racial matching, Afran, with co-counsel Roger Martindell, succeeded in forcing the elimination of racial matching rules in New Jersey’s adoption placements.
As a political figure, Prof. Afran ran for New Jersey’s U.S. Senate seat as the Green Party candidate in the 2000 election.
Prof. Afran has frequently appeared on New Jersey’s op-ed pages on a variety of legal and political issues and is a co-author of Jews On Trial (KTAV, 2005), an anthology of articles on political trials of Jews in the United States and Europe. In this newly published book, Prof. Afran contributed an exhaustive analysis of the “Atomic Spies” case where he demonstrates that a fundamental absence of due process protections imperiled justice in one of the 20th century’s most celebrated trials.