Jerome G. Rose, 86 years old, died on April 5, 2013 in Princeton, New Jersey where he has resided for the past 44 years.

He was professor of urban planning and professor of business law at Rutgers University for 27 years before his retirement in 1996. He was honored as an outstanding teacher, having won the Rutgers University prestigious Lindback Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as the Rutgers School of Business teaching awards. Upon his retirement in 1996, Rutgers created a new award in his honor, the Jerome G. Rose Excellence in Teaching Award to be given to outstanding teachers in the School of Planning and Public Policy. His students will remember him for his sense of humor, his dramatic presentations of material and his ability to make Land Use Law and Business Law engaging courses.

He was also a controversial land use planner who criticized the New Jersey Supreme Court's zoning decision that opened up suburban land for housing development. He had argued in many articles and land use conferences that the court's decision would drain the central cities of their middle class residents, concentrate the urban poor in New Jersey's cities and waste precious fuel and other resources. Instead of the court's urban policy he proposed programs of redevelopment within the cities. He incited the wrath of many critics by his assertion that the primary beneficiaries of the court's decision would be land use developers and not the urban poor.

In 1948 he received an A.B. with Distinction in Government from Cornell University where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1951. He was a member of the Bar of the State of New York and a licensed Professional Planner in the State of New Jersey. He had been a member of the Princeton Township Zoning Board and the Princeton Regional Planning Board. Before retirement he had been a consultant to many municipal and state government agencies on matters relating to housing and land use control.


Starting in 1972 and continuing for twenty years thereafter, he was Editor-in-Chief of the Real Estate Law Journal, a quarterly review of developments in the fields of real estate law, taxation and finance. He has written eight books on various aspects of land use regulation, seventy articles and an autobiography as well as several booklets about his extensive travels.


He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Naomi, three children; Patricia Zeigler, Elizabeth Rose and Theodore Rose and six grandchildren.

A Memorial Service will be held on Sunday, April 14, 2013 at 11:00am in the Wilson Room of Princeton Windrows, 2000 Windrow Drive, Princeton, NJ 08540.