Overview
Over time, Columbia Law School's established role in fostering the development of international and comparative law and jurisprudence has been reflected in the strength of its curriculum. Honed by continuous innovation, the Law School's curriculum offers the most extraordinary array of international, comparative, and foreign law courses of any law school in the United States.
In a typical year, law students at Columbia can choose from approximately 70 international, foreign, and comparative law courses, opening broad vistas of opportunity to students who will be the future leaders of international jurisprudence. Students can also choose from a remarkably diverse set of related hands-on experiences: from term time externships at the UN or UN missions, to a clinical experience involving human rights. The expansive curricular offerings of the Law School are vastly supplemented by curricular and other possibilities available through over a dozen established student exchange and double-degree opportunities at eminent institutions in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, in addition to any "Independent" programs that students are free to arrange on their own.
The richness of Columbia's international and comparative law curriculum is not limited to the courses formally identified as such. Columbia's faculty have been leaders in integrating comparative, foreign, and international law throughout the traditional law school curriculum. Comparative, foreign and public international law insights appear in such non-international courses as constitutional law, intellectual property, securities regulation, and labor law. We recognize that in today's world, legal problems do not come neatly bundled into "domestic" or "foreign" packages but require the ability to integrate knowledge from many sources both here and abroad, along with numerous "non-law" disciplines, from anthropology and cultural studies to economics and public choice theory. Throughout the curriculum, Columbia's professors resist the temptation to confine their topic to United States law of U.S.-based problems. As befits a school located at the crossroads of the world, Columbia insists on exposing its students to cosmopolitan perspectives from the first day of law school.
