Perry Dane is the recipient of the 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.