Forced to Choose, Rutgers Adjunct Opts for Client Over Teaching Gig
Conflict-of-interest rules apply not only to lawyers in practice, but to law professors—including in-practice attorneys teaching only a single course, an adjunct professor at a state law school in New Jersey has learned to her dismay.
So, forced to choose between a client and her $1,325-per-credit gig teaching an international mediation course at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, N.J., attorney Sheryl Mintz Goski of Herold Law has opted for the client, reports the New Jersey Law Journal.
That doesn’t, however, mean she is happy about the situation.
Goski is representing a client in a commercial dispute with Rutgers Business School, and this situation conflicts with her duty of loyalty to Rutgers and could be perceived by a client as giving her an inside track in resolving the dispute, says university deputy general counsel John Wolf in a memo obtained by the legal publication.
But Goski says she has no confidential access whatsoever as an adjunct instructor, and complains that the reach of the Rutgers conflicts rule is too broad. “The only message I get is that Rutgers is strong-arming my client,” she tells the New Jersey Law Journal.
One expert contacted by the legal publication says Goski has a good argument that the conflicts rule may be too attenuated. Yet “sometimes you have to shrug your shoulders and move on,” says Andrew Kushner of Asbell Kushner & Eutsler in Cherry Hill, N.J. He teaches as an adjunct professor of professional responsibility at Rutgers School of Law in Camden.
