Today’s Project 100 memory comes from James Barry.  He was born in Queens, New York.  He moved to Morristown when he was in second grade.  His father worked in sales for AT&T.  His mother was a teacher when he was young, but she focused on raising her children after they moved to New Jersey.  James is oldest of four children and has three brothers.  He also has two older stepbrothers.  He attended Catholic schools, where his mother worked, in New York, but he attended public schools after moving to New Jersey.  He graduated in 2000 from Morristown High School.  After graduating from Rowan in 2004 with honors and a history degree, he took a year off and worked as a stock handler, delivering materials to laboratories at a pharmaceutical company in New York.  He then began at Rutgers University Law School, finishing his degree with honors in 2008 and receiving the Maro R. Sondahl award for excellence in international law and arbitration at graduation.  His first position after Rutgers was as a law clerk for the Honorable Faustino J. Fernandez-Vina, who was then serving as the presiding judge of the civil division of the Camden Vicinage.  Judge Fernandez-Vina was subsequently appointed to the New Jersey Supreme Court in 2013. James then took a job with a firm in downtown Camden named DuBois, Sheehan Hamilton, Levin & Weissman LLC.  He found it fascinating that one of the founding members of the firm, Josiah DuBois, Jr. had been one of the prosecuting attorneys at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.  After about two years of handling cases involving land use, personal injury, and criminal law, he moved to Lundy Law in Philadelphia and focused exclusively on personal injury cases.  After two years at Lundy Law, he moved to the Locks Law Firm, where he shifted to working on class action lawsuits, mass torts, and environmental litigation. He became a partner there in 2019.  While there, he argued three cases before the New Jersey Supreme Court involving issues of consumer law and handled multiple cases before Appellate Division.  He is proud of this work, which has exclusively been on behalf of individuals, consumers, prisoners, and others cheated or injured by the actions of others. He has also served in leadership positions, previously acting as a co-chair for the consumer law sections of both the New Jersey State Bar Association and the New Jersey Association for Justice.  In 2020, he and Magistrate Judge Joel Schneider co-authored the Class Action chapter of the New Jersey State Bar’s Mass Torts & Class Actions treatise.  In 2022, he made the decision to join an international law firm, Pogust Goodhead, for whom he opened a New Jersey office in Moorestown.  He continues to focus on consumer, environmental, and “mass tort” cases.

*****

Rowan was the only college that accepted me.  I only applied to a few schools, and I wasn’t sure that college was the right decision for me.  I was not a great student in high school.  My parents were divorcing, and I didn’t focus at school.  I actually thought I would go into the military, but my mother insisted that I at least try college.  So, I went off to Glassboro in the Fall of 2000. 

I was an undeclared major when I began. I remember the first couple of months were difficult and adjusting to a new place was tough.  However, going to Rowan soon became a great decision for me. The freedom of college forced me to become organized and to get my life in order.  I was actually very lucky with my two roommates.  We were in Evergreen, and we were tripled up due a housing shortage.  T. J. Lee was a chemical engineering major.  His father worked for Inductotherm, Henry Rowan’s company.  He was one of the most brilliant people that I have ever met.  He was serious about school but also a lot of fun.  He showed me that you could do both and also how to do both.  Jeff Nelson was my other roommate, and he was from southern New Jersey.  He knew a lot of people, and he made it a lot easier for me to fit in down in south Jersey.

I had always done well in history in high school, the one subject that I excelled in.  I did well in my AP history classes.  I didn’t think about majoring in it initially, but once I took my first history class, I realized that I should just study this subject that I loved.  I thought I would be a high school teacher, but this plan came together too late to graduate in four years.  So, I just focused on the history major.

Many of my history classes were great.  I loved Dr. Kress’s World War II class, which was one of the first Rowan history classes I took.  His course was one of the reasons that I declared as a history major.  He really knew the subject well, and the topic was just fascinating. 

I remember really enjoying learning Middle Eastern history with Dr. Blake.  It was a subject that I knew nothing about before the course.  I loved learning about the deep history of the region and the background to the conflicts, revolts, and violence that erupted in the late 20^th century.  Of course, the class had special resonance because I was taking it shortly after 9/11.

Dr. Gary Hunter’s African American course was also wonderful.  He was one of the nicest people that you could meet.  He had great local knowledge, which he infused in the course.  It was clear that he had a lifetime of knowledge in the field, and it was a privilege to be in his classroom. 

I took several classes with you Dr. Carrigan, including Historical Methods and Civil War and Reconstruction.  One of my great memories was the Independent Study course that I took with you on 19^th century Irish American history.  I wrote a paper on a Civil War general from New York named Michael Corcoran.  I did archival research at the New York City Historical Society for this paper.  At this time, I was seriously considering going to graduate school in history.

I made life-long friends at Rowan.  In addition to T.J. and Jeff and several folks with whom I am still close, my wife actually attended Rowan at the same time as me. Although we didn’t really meet while undergraduates, the Rowan connection was indirectly important to our relationship. 

Shortly before I began at Rowan, I wasn’t even thinking of attending college.  At Glassboro, I became a serious student and gained the skills to be able to go to law school, something that I would not have imagined for myself in high school.  My four years at Rowan were among the most formative years of my life.   

*****

This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/