Check out the Clinic's recent Op-Ed on Ciudad Juarez at OpEdNews.com.
The pursuit of international human rights is a hallmark of Columbia Law School's reputation. The Law School's pioneering Human Rights Clinic exposes students to the practice of law in the cross-cultural context of international human rights litigation and advocacy. From the clinic's beginnings, students have been immersed in some of the most important human rights issues of our era.
The clinic combines regular classroom instruction with specially tailored exercises and simulations designed to instill the basics of good legal practice. In addition to research and writing, the clinic fosters the development of other fundamental lawyering skills, such as interviewing and counseling clients, fact investigation and development, case organization and management, legal drafting, and oral advocacy.
To bridge theory and practice, the Human Rights Clinic provides students with hands-on experience working on active human rights cases and projects. Though most skills-training is imparted through classroom instruction and simulations, it is applied and tested in the context of real-world advocacy. Working in partnership with experienced attorneys and institutions engaged in human rights activism, both in the United States and abroad, students contribute to effecting positive change locally and globally. In recent semesters, clinic students have engaged in transitional-justice research and participated in sessions of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, students were involved in petitioning the Inter-American Commission to protect the rights of detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Students have also worked with Human Rights Watch and other groups to focus the attention of the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on whether the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service is complying with international standards in its "war on terrorism" detentions.
"The Human Rights Clinic was an experience unlike anything else in law school because it's modeled on a real-world scenario. You have actual clients with real needs, in real time, and you have real deadlines. You can see how the doctrine that you're learning affects people's lives. The collaborative aspects of clinical work are a strong part of that reality. We're co-counsel in almost every case, so we work with real organizations, as well as with lawyers and advocates in the United States and abroad, and we have not only responsibilities to our clients but to our co-counsel." --Carrie Bettinger-Lopez '04
Professor Peter Rosenblum joined the Columbia faculty in the fall of 2003. He came to Columbia from Harvard Law School, where he was associate director of the Human Rights Program and initiated the school's first seminar in human rights advocacy. Rosenblum has worked in international human rights since 1989, first for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and then for a number of other organizations including Human Rights Watch, the International Human Rights Law Group, and the United Nations. He has extensive experience in Europe, Asia, and Africa, where he continues to pursue projects in advocacy and research. Rosenblum writes frequently on human rights and Africa and has published articles on the international criminal tribunals and human rights pedagogy.
