The Center addresses globalization's legal dimensions through diverse interdisciplinary research and scholarship. The Center supports (1) long term research projects, such as collaborative research with professional disciplines other than law, including economics and philosophy, and other professional schools including the schools of business, journalism, public health, and international and public affairs; (2) periodic conferences and other speaker series; (3) associations and public policy oriented projects with other Columbia University centers and programs, including the Earth Institute, the Institute for Human Rights, the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, and the Center for International Organizations; and (4) joint programs with international organizations such as the United Nations.
Founded in March 2003, the Center's initiatives flow naturally from Columbia Law School's exceptionally rich curriculum relating to global law issues and its activities in turn affect that curriculum. The law school offers, as part of its regular curriculum, perhaps the largest number of courses and seminars of any U.S. law school focusing on the challenges emerging from transnational movement of goods, capital, people, or ideas. Seminars and courses dealing with the degradation of the global commons, transitional justice in the wake of mass atrocity, international crime and terrorism, the regulation of the multinational enterprise and transnational capital, immigration and human rights form the backbone of our international and comparative law curriculum. The Center engages in on-going review of the law school's extensive curriculum and identifies effective collaborators for teaching and research from communities outside the law school, including the worlds of practice and public policy. It invites distinguished individuals from academe as well as those engaged in international public policy, whether in private practice or other settings, to the law school for speakers series, roundtables and other fora, usually in venues that are open to the wider Columbia University community and the general public. The law school's associations with preeminent law faculties or institutes in Paris, London, Leiden, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, and Johannesburg provide the Center with ready access to relevant legal expertise and diverse points of view from throughout the world. Global legal issues also feature prominently in many of Columbia's fourteen student-edited journals (including six journals focusing on international, foreign, or arbitral law), as well as in the efforts of other Columbia Law School programs, including centers on Japanese, Korean, Chinese and European law, and some of the Center's programs are undertaken in collaboration with student-edited journals or these other programs.
Although the Center is relatively new to the law school, it has undertaken, since its founding, a variety of activities, including a public speaker series, an academic conference, and a program for auditing law school classes for members of the UN diplomatic community (The Columbia/UNITAR Fellowship Program). The Center also sponsors, annually, an Appel Fellow from the entering LLM class to assist in Center activities. The Center on Global Governance, together with Columbia Law School, is an Academic Partner of the American Society of International Law.
The Center's Directors are Professor Michael Doyle and Richard Gardner.
For more information on the Center, please feel free to contact:
Vincent M. DeLuca
Director of International and Comparative Law Initiatives vdeluc@law.columbia.edu
(212) 854-0084
