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J.D. ApplicantsColumbia Law School offers a broad range of career services and programs to support students and graduates of the Law School in their career decision-making process. Through the expertise and individual attention of the Career Services Office and the Center for Public Interest Law, Columbia provides unmatched opportunities for students to join in real-world legal efforts, and a comprehensive approach to developing fulfilling careers.
Gender Studies
  
Columbia Law School features a collection of activities exploring the legal aspects of gender and the gender aspects of law. Along with foundational courses and seminars, students also have the opportunity for practical experience from the Center for Public Interest, Social Justice Initiatives, and Clinics.
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Faculty
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Ariela R. Dubler
Elizabeth F. Emens
Katherine M. Franke
Suzanne Goldberg
Philip Genty
Carol Sanger
Jane M. Spinak
Kendall Thomas
Patricia J. Williams
CLS Alumni
Alumnae Whose Careers Bear Watching
These 19 women, all graduates of the past 20 years, are on their way to becoming stars of the legal profession and blazing today’s trails in politics, business, academia, the judiciary, and public interest work.
The Women of the 30's and 40's
Excepts of audiotaped interviews of 20 CLS alumnae.
The Alumnae of Columbia Law School - Women Serving Women
22 Individual Portraits
How do you choose 22 outstanding graduates from an institution that has produced so many gifted alumnae? View a selection of portraits of graduates who have gone on to amazing and pioneering careers in a variety of areas.
Programs and Services
Social Justice Initiatives
Social Justice Initiatives (SJI) works collaboratively with Columbia faculty, students and staff as well as public interest organizations and governmental agencies to strengthen the Law School's public interest, human rights and public service programs.
The Center for Public Interest Law
The Center for Public Interest Law assists students individually in exploring the role of a public interest lawyer in nonprofit organizations, government agencies, international human rights organizations, academia, and other areas, including pro bono service in private law firms.
Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic
The work of law reform presents innumerable challenges and opportunities. What does it mean to advocate on behalf of a community? How do advocates select among issues? Once priorities have been set, how should choices be made among various law reform strategies, including litigation, public education, grassroots advocacy, and legislative efforts? How best can those strategic choices be executed? And, at every step of the way, how do advocates contend with shifting political and legal terrain? The Clinic provides students the opportunity to engage with these questions while participating directly in the development of sexuality and gender law. Click here for the Dean's original announcement of the clinic.
Coursework
Gender Justice
This course will provide an introduction to the concrete legal contexts in which issues of gender and justice have been articulated, disputed and hesitatingly and provisionally resolved. Readings will cover issues such as Women and the Legal Profession, Sexual Harassment, Sex Role Stereotyping, Work/Family Conflict, Marriage and Alternatives to Marriage, Parenting, Domestic Violence, Reproduction and Pregnancy, Rape, Sex Work & Trafficking, Gender & Cultural Equality, and International Women?s Rights.
Feminist Legal Theory
This seminar examines feminist jurisprudence as a distinct project, exploring how feminist legal theorists have thought about sex, gender and sexuality in understanding and critiquing our legal system and its norms.
Family Law
This basic offering will focus on legal regulation of marriage and other intimate relationships and will examine the sociological justifications for state intervention in families.
Seminar: Topics in Law and Sexuality
This seminar will explore the ideological and institutional intersections of law and sexuality.
Seminar: Regulating Sex and Sexuality
This seminar will explore the ways in which American law regulates sex and sexuality. We will examine which forms of consensual sexual expression are legally prohibited and ask why the law deems these acts illicit. Likewise, we will examine how the law privileges particular forms of sexual intimacy through laws that regulate family formation.
Seminar: The Family and the State
In an age when family law topics regularly dominate political debate (see, e.g., same-sex marriage and marriage-promotion policies), this seminar will explore how the law has constructed the institution of the family, focusing on the ways in which courts and legislatures have used the family as a site for defining women's and men's distinct legal, social, and political rights and responsibilities.
Meanings of Motherhood
This course will explore the shifting and contested meanings of motherhood as individual experience and in its institutional context at different historical moments and in contemporary United States.
Race and Gender-Conscious Remedies
This seminar will compare and assess a range of "affirmative action" or "positive action" policies around the globe. These policies are designed to advance equal opportunity and social inclusion by extending special measures to targeted members of historically marginalized populations--particularly racial or ethnic minorities and women.
Social Justice Litigation
Today's robust civil rights and civil liberties legal infrastructures share common genealogical roots. Born in the early 20th century, both the ACLU and the NAACP developed aggressive legal approaches to address social injustice through law. These efforts were among the first progeny of the unlikely marriage between radical philanthropy and the traditionally conservative American institution, law.
Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic
The Clinic in Sexuality and Gender Law provides students with the opportunity to work directly on sexuality- and gender-related litigation and non-litigation projects while learning about the many dimensions of lawyering for social change. While the Clinic's specific focus is in the area of women's rights and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, students will develop substantive and strategic expertise and reflective lawyering skills that will be directly applicable to law reform work in any context.
Child Advocacy Clinic
Students in the clinic will represent undocumented immigrant children in their self-petitions for immigration status and work on law reform projects for immigrant children. Representation will include affirmative applications to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and deportation defense before the Immigration Court in cases where children are seeking relief on their own.
Human Rights Clinic
Students in this clinic review basic human rights law concepts and refine lawyering skills in the context of human rights law practice. The Fall semester of the clinic involves a review of substantive law and lawyering practice through case simulations, as well as an introduction to the actual cases and projects students will work on during the course of the year. With a grounding in human rights legal practice and a case plan developed during the Fall semester, in the Spring semester, students will focus more on their actual advocacy projects, which may include overseas travel and drafting complaints.
Prisoners and Families Clinic
The goal of the PFC is to provide advocacy to prisoners who are seeking parole release in order to be reunified with their families. Students enroll in the Clinic for one semester only but are generally able to continue working with their clients in subsequent semesters. Students, working in pairs, have primary responsibility for interviewing and counseling a client, examining records from their underlying criminal cases, obtaining documents in support of parole release, developing a case theory and litigating on behalf of the client.
Feminist Legal Theory Workshop
The Feminist Legal Theory Workshop will provide students exposure to new work by scholars of feminist legal theory. Each week a prominent scholar in this area will come to the Law School to present new work or a work-in-progress and discuss it with the members of the seminar.
Seminar: Sexual Harassment in Employment: Policy and Practice
This seminar is designed to explore legal and policy issues raised by the statutes and court decisions in the evolving area of sexual harassment.
Seminar: Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights
This seminar uses the new scholarship on sexuality to engage with ongoing theoretical conversations and activism in gender, health, law, and human rights.
Lawyering, Social Change, and the Development of Sexuality and Gender Law
This seminar explores the development of sexuality and gender law through history, political science, and constitutional doctrine and theory, as well as through consideration of strategic litigation and political organizing.
Seminar: Gender and Development
This seminar will introduce students to the role that gender plays in the success and assessment of development strategies and the expansion of human capabilities.
Externship: Battered Women's Legal Services
Students will work at the Sanctuary for Families' Center for Battered Women's Legal Services approximately 12-15 hours per week.
Employment Discrimination
This course examines the legal and regulatory approaches to employment discrimination.
Journals & Publications
Journal of Gender and Law
Founded in 1989 by students at Columbia University School of Law, the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law is a journal devoted to scholarship on the interaction between gender and law. We seek to foster dialogue, debate, and awareness about gender-related issues and feminist scholarship.
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