To ensure that students are ready to work in the real and constantly changing legal world, Columbia's course selections address public interest topics from the full spectrum of legal perspectives, from trial practice to legal philosophy. Columbia has an ongoing commitment to hiring professors who meet students' need to learn about the areas in which they will practice law against an evolving cultural backdrop. Today, the Law School is a particularly vibrant place for learning, with faculty delving into exciting new forms of public interest advocacy, such as action-oriented research, collaborative problem solving, and other alternatives to litigation.
Columbia takes advantage of its New York City location to augment its full-time faculty with adjunct professors who work "in the trenches." Lawyers from such prominent organizations as Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as well as working judges and leading government agency attorneys teach a variety of non-textbook-based classes. Through their personal experiences, students learn about the practice of law as it really happens. The following public interest courses are a sample of those offered recently.
Public interest education at Columbia reflects its many international law faculty members whose scholarship and practice focus on the public sphere. In classes on foreign investment and the U.N. Global Compact, for example, students think through the implications of corporate behavior on human development, the environment, and human rights. Students in the Environmental Law Clinic engage the World Bank Inspection panel while those in the Human Rights Clinic travel to Africa and the Caribbean to represent their clients. Other students study with professors who are advocates in emerging areas of law such as the intersection of international human rights law and immigration, the legal rights and status of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, and the rights of non-citizens on death row in the United States.
