Paula Franzese is the Peter Rodino Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School. She received her B.A., summa *** laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Barnard College, Columbia University, where she was awarded the Bryson Prize, Alpha Zeta Fellowship, Marion Churchill White Prize, Davidson-Foreman Foundation Award and Barnard Alumnae Fellowship, and her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, where she was an International Fellow, Teaching Fellow and recipient of the prestigious Rosenman Prize for excellencein public law courses. She was a litigator with Cahill, Gordon, and Reindel in New York City, where she also served as a member of the NYC Housing Court Reform Project and the Governor's Task Force on Life and Law. She clerked for Justice Alan B. Handler of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Professor Franzese’s casebook, Property Law and the Public Interest (Lexis Nexis, 2003), (with Callies, Mandelker & Hylton), is heralded as one of the first to expansively explore the public interest dimensions of property law. Her scholarship in the area of property includes critical examination of common interest communities and the dilemma of privatization, the law of servitudes, exclusionary zoning, affordable housing, adverse possession doctrine and takings law. She joined in the submission of an amicus brief in the Kelo Case, and has written and presented on takings law reform. In 2006 she was named to the editorial board of the Land Use and Environmental Law Review, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. She has published extensively on the anatomy of ethics reform of state and local government, and in the areas of commercial and contracts law, legal pedagogy and attorney professionalism. She is a contributor to two new books: America's Second Gilded Age? Perspectives on Law and Class Differences (NYU Press, 2006) and The Affective Assistance of Counsel: Practicing Law as a Healing Profession (Carolina Academic Press, 2007). She is the Gilbert's "Legend of the Law" in property (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and is the author and presenter of an audiotape and CD collection on property (Thomson, 2003).

Nationally acclaimed for her teaching, Professor Franzese is the unprecedentedeight-time recipient of the Seton Hall Law Student Bar Association’s Professor of the Year Award. Nominated for the Robert Foster Cherry Prize for Great Teaching, she has been named “Exemplary Teacher" by the American Association of Higher Education and was ranked the Top Law Professor in New Jersey by the New Jersey Law Journal.

In 2006, Professor Franzese was appointed chair of the newly empowered State Ethics Commission by Governor Jon Corzine. In 2005, she was appointed by Governor Corzine to serve on the gubernatorial transition team's Ethics and Policy Management Task Force. In 2004, Professor Franzese and New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Daniel J. O'Hern were appointed Special Ethics Counsel to Governor Codey. In that capacity, they submitted the most comprehensive ethics audit and reform agenda of its kind, resulting in significant ethics reform of the Executive Branch of State Government and promulgation of New Jersey's first Uniform Ethics Code. Their work has garnered national attention, as other states take up the task of ethics reform.

For Professor Franzese’s Martindale-Hubbell® profile, click here.