John Oberdiek became Acting Dean for a two-year term in July 2014 after serving two years as Vice Dean.

Dean Oberdiek writes and teaches in torts and tort theory, regulation and its theoretical foundations, and legal, political, and moral philosophy. He is a graduate of Middlebury College, and studied philosophy and law as a post-graduate at Oxford, NYU, from which he holds an MA, and the University of Pennsylvania, which granted him his JD and PhD through its dual-degree fellowship program. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2004, he practiced law at the Washington, D.C. firm of Arnold & Porter.

Dean Oberdiek has presented his work widely in colloquia, including at Yale, Penn, and Toronto, and at major conferences, including Kings College London's Moral Values and Private Law conference, The New Private Law conference at Harvard, Northwestern's Ethics and Politics conference, and the Analytic Legal Philosophy Conference, held at Yale. He is a past chair of the AALS's sections on both jurisprudence and scholarship. In 2005-06, he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow in the University Center for Human Values and a Fellow in the Program in Ethics and Public Affairs, both at Princeton. In spring 2012, he was a visiting professor at the University of Graz, Austria.

In addition, Dean Oberdiek is Associate Graduate Faculty in the Rutgers-New Brunswick Philosophy Department and a Director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy, under whose auspices he has organized several major conferences. He is also Co-Editor of the peer-reviewed professional journal Law and Philosophy and serves on the editorial board of Legal Theory.