Professor Paula Franzese, the Peter W. Rodino Professor of Law,  is one of the country's leading experts in property law as well as government ethics. She has spearheaded ethics reform initiatives on behalf of three governors, serving as special ethics counsel to Governor Richard Codey and Chair of the State Ethics Commission and has advised jurisdictions across the nation including Mayor Cory Booker's administration in Newark.

Professor Franzese’s casebook, Property Law and the Public Interest (3d ed., Lexis, 2007), (with Callies, Mandelker & Hylton), is heralded as one of the first to expansively explore the public interest dimensions of Property law. In May 2009, she was elected a Fellow of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, a highly coveted honor. Her scholarship in the area of Property includes critical examination of common interest communities, homeowners associations and the dilemma of privatization, the law of servitudes, exclusionary zoning, affordable housing, adverse possession doctrine and takings law. She joined in the submission to the U.S. Supreme Court 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 prestigious peer-reviewed scholarly journal. She has published extensively on the anatomy of ethics reform of state and local government, and in the areas of legal pedagogy and attorney professionalism. She is a contributor to the books America's Second Gilded Age? Perspectives on Law and Class Differences (NYU Press, 2006), The Affective Assistance of Counsel: Practicing Law as a Healing Profession (Carolina Academic Press, 2007), and Reaction and Reform in New Jersey (Hall Institute, 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). 

Prof. Franzese is the unprecedented eight-time recipient of the 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. Prof. Franzese has demonstrated and deconstructed her “teaching magic” at the Association of American Law Schools Annual Meetings and has presented on teaching as both art and science at the Institute for Law School Teaching and at various faculty colloquia across the country. She is past Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Teaching Methods, and in 2008 she was named Vice-Chair of the Legal Education Section of the American Bar Association.

Professor Franzese was a litigator with Cahill, Gordon, and Reindel in New York City, where she also served as a member of the New York 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.

She received her B.A., summa cum 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 excellence in public law courses.