Journal editor-in-chiefs are all Minority Student Program participants
It wasn’t so long ago that the nation’s law school classrooms were filled with men – white men in particular. Women and minorities needed not apply.
Welcome to 2013, when four of the five main journals at Rutgers–Newark School of Law are headed by women. In a further measure of the distinctive culture at the school, these editors in chief are also participants in the Minority Student Program (MSP), which since 1968 has been devoted to promoting diversity in the school and the legal profession as a whole.
“Being part of the MSP family has broadened my professional network and support group in exciting ways that I have yet to discover, Patrina Ozurumba says.
Ozurumba and Emmy Acevedo are co-editors of the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, whose faculty adviser in its early years was another trail blazer: Rutgers–Newark law professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court and the first Jewish woman on the top court.
The Reporter was the country’s first legal journal to focus on women’s legal rights. Rutgers-Newark is also credited with admitting women to its first entering class, and creating the first law school clinic combating discrimination based on gender.
Holding the editorial position “means following in the footsteps of some very extraordinary women and living up to the journal’s historic roots as the first legal publication devoted to women’s issues,” Acevedo says.
Determined since middle school to become an attorney but with no lawyers in the family to shadow, Acevedo sought out legal-oriented programs and mentoring opportunities. All experiences confirmed her decision to pursue a law degree, she says.
Acevedo received a B.A. in political science from Haverford College. The summer after her sophomore year, she learned that a high school classmate had been killed by her boyfriend. The event pushed her to find ways to aid victims of sexual and domestic violence.
Her activities at Rutgers include the Domestic Violence Advocacy Project and the Courtroom Advocates Project, as well as the Community Law Clinic. Since 2009 she has volunteered with the Mount Sinai Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program.
Acevedo hopes a clerkship followed by firm experience will enable her to open her own practice in the future. She is particularly interested in family law, trusts and estates, and corporate law.
Ozurumba, who holds a B.A. in economics from Barnard College, worked as a health care finance
analyst for UBS Investment Bank and an associate consultant in the executive compensation practice at Hay Group before starting law school.
“I have always wanted to be an attorney,” she says, “but I also knew I wanted to obtain skills that would ensure I would be a sought-after business lawyer.”
As a law student, Ozurumba held summer positions at Wyndham Worldwide and the New York City’s Comptroller’s Office; served as co-president of the Labor and Employment Law Society; and was selected to participate in the New York City Bar Association and the Alliance of Securities and Financial Educators’ Securities and Finance Law Seminar Series.
After graduation, Ozurumba will be an associate at a New York law firm with a primary focus on hedge fund and private equity transactions.
Silvia Medina, editor in chief of the Rutgers Law Review, was an evening student during her first three years of law school, commuting 60 miles four days a week to Newark from her IT analyst job with the Administrative Office of the Courts in Trenton. Medina says she has relished her position on a journal that since 1947 has contributed to the national dialogue on complex contemporary legal issues.
As an undergraduate interested in human behavior, Medina majored in psychology at Douglass Residential Campus. Thinking she might want to practice criminal law one day, she also received a certificate in criminology.
She has been a member of the law school’s Moot Court Board, Student Bar Association vice president for evening students, Association of Latin American Law Students alumni liaison, MSP study group facilitator and, most recently, a member of the Student Advisory Group for the Rutgers Universitywide Strategic Planning Initiative.
In the fall, Medina will join the Commercial Litigation Practice Group at White & Case, LLP.
As the first member of her family to attend law school, Alba Aviles says having her name at the top of the Rutgers Race & and the Law Review masthead is particularly meaningful. So is the journal’s mission of increasing awareness of multicultural issues.
Aviles plans to use her J.D. to advocate for others, a goal she traces to her experience when she was 2, and her mother brought her and her sister out of war-torn El Salvador to join their father who had emigrated to the United States.
Aviles is a cum laude graduate of Syracuse University with a B.A. in international relations and geography. At Rutgers–Newark Law, she received a scholarship from the Hispanic Bar Association of New Jersey, and she has served as co-president of the Association of American Law Students, a Public Interest Law Foundation representative, and student board member of the Loan Repayment Assistance Program.
Next year Aviles will clerk for Superior Court judge Walter Koprowski, Jr. She also plans to mentor young students.