Rachel Gerson is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Seton Hall Law School Center for Social Justice in the Health Justice Clinic. As part of the Housing Justice Project, she supervises students working on housing cases that have a connection with health or disability. Her practice and research interests include disability law, mental health law, and poverty law.

Prior to joining the Seton Hall faculty, Professor Gerson was a supervising attorney at the Urban Justice Center Mental Health Project, a non-profit legal services organization that works with low-income New Yorkers with mental health concerns to disrupt and dismantle cycles of hospitalization, homelessness, and incarceration. During her time at the Urban Justice Center, she created and later expanded the project’s health advocacy practice, which has helped hundreds of people navigate and receive services from public health insurance programs. She also worked with people who were subject to adult guardianship to modify or terminate guardianships that were harmful or no longer necessary. She served as Court-appointed evaluator on dozens of adult guardianship cases, advising the Court on whether a guardianship was necessary under the law and the least restrictive form of guardianship.

Professor Gerson graduated from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she was a Public Service Scholar, Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, and Associate Editor of the Cardozo Law Review. She was a post-graduate fellow with the Honorable Mark Partnow in New York State Supreme Court, Civil Division. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Barnard College.