Leadership giving makes a direct and significant impact on the learning, teaching, scholarship, and community engagement available at Columbia Law School. Endowed and current use gifts support scholarships and other student financial aid, professorships and faculty research, centers and programs, clinics and experiential learning, facility enhancements, and the Annual Fund.
For more information about how you can create a lasting legacy at Columbia Law School, contact the major gifts team at [email protected] or 212-854-2680.
Learn more about our leadership giving opportunities below.
Since our founding in 1858, we have welcomed to our campus generations of outstanding students from all walks of life, from both the U.S. and abroad, and have supported them as they have pursued their professional and personal goals. Our current fundraising focus is on securing the resources to grow the Law School’s signature wrap around approach to student support. This approach aims to recruit the very best students, support them while in school, and give them real flexibility in choosing a career after graduation.
We invite you to consider making a leadership commitment to one or more of the following areas of student support:
Named Endowed and Current Use Scholarships—advance both access and choice to bring to Columbia Law School the best and brightest students regardless of socioeconomic background.
Guaranteed Summer Funding Program—provides every 1L and 2L student the opportunity to pursue full time, eight to 10 week, summer public service internships at non-profit organizations, public interest law firms or in government.
Human Rights Summer Internships—provides 2L and 3L students with intensive experiential learning in international human rights legal practice.
Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP)—helps public service graduates repay law school debt. Loans are gradually forgiven when graduates remain in public service or government employment for more than three years. The program also offers public service bridge loans to help cover the costs related to preparation for a state bar examination.
Whether the issue is war or peace, corporate governance or human rights, climate change or energy policy, Columbia Law School has always attracted the world’s foremost legal scholars to its faculty. These professors excel as teachers, including mentoring and inspiring students, and in their own research or practice, while also contributing to public debate about vital matters affecting law and civil society. To recruit and retain a premier faculty, we are committed to making the investments necessary to nurture and support their ambitious scholarship and teaching. Through named professorships, faculty research funds, grants for curriculum development and programming, and postdoctoral research fellowships, we will protect and fully develop the one asset the Law School cannot do without: its intellectual capital.
Columbia Law School’s research centers and programs reflect the breadth of our faculty’s expertise and the exceptional quality of their scholarship. Through their rigorous research, faculty experts explore foundational, emerging, and interdisciplinary areas of the law. In addition to convening academics, policymakers, judges, and business leaders from around the globe, centers and programs offer students valuable opportunities to collaborate with experienced scholars and researchers.
For nearly 50 years, clinics have been an essential part of the Columbia Law School experience. More importantly, they have a real-world impact and have improved countless lives in New York City and across the globe. We have secured asylum for vulnerable families, protected adolescents’ rights, advanced environmental protections, pursued criminal justice and human rights, and resolved familial and workplace conflicts. Our goal is to expand our clinical offering significantly, to give more students a chance to be part of this important work and gain practical skills, to serve a larger number of clients who might not otherwise have access to high-quality representation, and to address a more diverse range of issues.
Named spaces are a way to not only support the educational experience of our students by creating places for them to learn, study and gather, but also a way for the Law School to impress upon our students a shared sense of legacy and involvement from our friends and alumni. The Law School has a wide variety of opportunities and donation levels.
The Annual Fund is the unsung hero of our budget. It stands apart from endowed and other designated leadership gifts because its monies are available for immediate use, allowing us to respond to unexpected opportunities and cutting-edge ideas as they arise. When a student or professor comes to the dean with a well-developed proposal for a timely project that will contribute to the public good, she can deliver—because she has the flexibility afforded by the Annual Fund. Gifts to the Annual Fund allow us to be nimble and proactive as we build on our immersive curriculum, support our outstanding faculty, and prepare our gifted students for success in a complex and changing world.