Jay and Ann Gutierrez have provided for a law scholarship in their estate plans in gratitude for his law school experience.
Reflecting on their legacy and the forces that carried them into the golden years of their early 70s, Jay and Ann Gutierrez turned their attention to revised estate planning. Rutgers Law School rose to the top of their list.
“It was obvious to us that, aside from our marriage and the positive influences from our own parents, Rutgers Law School was critical to our family’s success,” says Gutierrez CLAW’79, a retired managing partner of the Energy Practice Group at Morgan Lewis, a global law firm headquartered in Philadelphia. “My message to my fellow Rutgers law alums is simple: We received a quality education for a great price. It enabled many of us to give our children opportunities that we couldn’t afford, and we should give back to the place that provided this platform.”
In gratitude for this access to an excellent legal education, the couple revised their estate planning to include a $100,000 planned gift to Rutgers to provide a scholarship at Rutgers Law School to be awarded to third-year law students.
“The process was simple and anyone who wants to learn more should reach out to the Rutgers University Foundation,” Gutierrez says.
Having recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, Jay and Ann couldn’t help but also identify their mutually supportive marriage as a key building block of their success. It was Ann who pushed Jay to apply to Rutgers Law School in Camden in 1976.
“Without Ann, who put her own career on hold to pay for and support me at Rutgers, I would probably still be teaching high school in Frederick, Maryland,” says Gutierrez, who earned an undergraduate philosophy degree from Georgetown.
Instead, Gutierrez graduated from Rutgers in 1979 and embarked on a successful legal career as a nuclear regulatory attorney—first at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and later representing owners and operators of nuclear power plants in the United States and abroad.
“Ann and I were always open to new challenges and opportunities,” say Gutierrez, who spent most of his career in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Delray Beach, Florida. “I would never have pushed myself without Ann’s support.”
Gutierrez also reflected on his other “nuclear” family. Right after World War II, his father—the son of first-generation immigrants from Spain and the first among either side of his family to go to school—began attending Newark College of Engineering, now the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in addition to working a full-time job at Western Electric. It took his father eleven years to earn an electrical engineering degree while his mother worked to support the family, raising Jay and his four siblings.
Gutierrez remembers going to his dad’s college graduation at a movie theater in Newark in 1959 when he was just eight years old.
“I understood the significance of this achievement for my family, and that there was no way my dad could have succeeded without the support of my mom,” he says. “Of course, they disagreed privately, but my parents always had this strong alliance when dealing with us kids. It was stabilizing as a child.”
Likewise, Ann and Jay’s strong marriage enabled them to raise three “self-sufficient adult children—including one attorney—who are all hard-working with growing young families of their own.”
“What I’ve concluded is, if a couple thinks as a team, there’s not this ‘What did you do, what did I do? What did you make, what did I make?’“ he says. “You think as a team, with team goals, couple goals. You achieve far more this way.”
After Gutierrez’s father succeeded in his career as an engineer, he established a trust at his alma mater in gratitude for the education he received.
“My dad told me that it’s important to give back to the people and places that give so much to us,” Gutierrez says. “I hope that my decision to give to Rutgers might inspire others to think about doing the same someday."
WE ARE YOU is an ongoing series of stories about the people who embody Rutgers University’s unwavering commitment to academic excellence, building community, and the common good.
