Smith Family Human Rights Clinic

Course Information

Course Number
L9233
Curriculum Level
Upperclass
Areas of Study
Clinics, Externships, and Experiential Learning, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Procedure, Human Rights, International and Comparative Law, Racial, Economic, and Social Justice
Type
Clinic
Additional Attributes
Experiential Credit

Section 001 Information

Instructor

Sarah Knuckey Sarah Maree Knuckey Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann and Bernstein Clinical Professor of Human Rights

Section Description

Year-long clinic:
Fall: 7 credits: 4 graded for seminar component & 3 graded for project work
Spring: 5 credits: 2 graded for seminar component & 3 graded for project work
Credit adjustments possible in exceptional circumstances in consultation with professor

The Human Rights Clinic prepares students for lifelong careers in social justice advocacy around the globe. Through the Clinic, students join a community of advocates working to promote human rights and to recalibrate the global power imbalances that drive economic and political inequality, exploitation, threats to physical security, poverty, and environmental injustice. Through fact-finding, reporting, litigation, media engagement, advocacy, training, and innovative methods, the Clinic seeks to prevent abuse, promote accountability, and advance respect for human rights. Embedded in the Clinic's work is a commitment to the values of equality and mutual exchange in transnational partnerships; respect for rights-holder autonomy, voice, and power; and diversity, inclusion, full participation, and justice within the human rights field.

Through a combination of Seminars and Project Work, and with the mentorship of Clinic professors and supervisors, students develop the wide range of skills necessary to be strategic and creative human rights advocates, critically analyze human rights, and advance the human rights methodologies of the Clinic and the human rights field.

Clinic Seminars provide a map of the terrain of international human rights advocacy, including the field's dominant strategies, methods, and critiques, equipping students with the knowledge and the tools to navigate the field with confidence and critical reflection. Students learn to assess where they and human rights projects are positioned, the available routes for action, and how to ethically, pragmatically, and responsibly choose which steps to take toward which ends. They learn project selection and design; choice and sequence of advocacy tactics; fact-finding and interdisciplinary research methods; interviewing witnesses, experts, and perpetrators; evidence assessment; digital and physical security; report and brief-writing; using judicial and quasi-judicial processes; advocacy options at the local, national, regional, and international levels; engaging the press and using social media; mitigating vicarious trauma and promoting resilience; ethical frameworks and the navigation of ethical dilemmas; and accountability and project evaluation. The Clinic engages students in an active and co-creator mode of education, and students are taught to self-assess and monitor their own progress, and are involved in building the methods, pedagogy, and institution of the Clinic itself.

Students work in teams on projects pursuing social justice in partnership with civil society and communities. Clinic Projects vary from year to year, each addressing marginalized, urgent, and complex human rights issues around the world, including in Peru, Chad, Centrafrique, Papua New Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, and the United States. Past projects have addressed corporate accountability for human rights violations and environmental harms in the extractives industry, human rights and humanitarian law violations in counterterrorism operations and armed conflict, the right to health, abuses by UN peacekeepers, and sexual violence. Through its project work, the Clinic functions similarly to a non-governmental organization, with students implementing advocacy projects.

The Clinic is also a laboratory for testing new, innovative, and interdisciplinary modes of human rights work, and seeks to be a model of rigorous and critical human rights advocacy.

To provide a support structure for these goals, the Clinic builds a community of current students, alumni, scholars, and advocates who support one another and collaborate toward the advancement of human rights.

For more, please visit: http://web.law.columbia.edu/clinics/human-rights-clinic

School Year & Semester
Spring 2024
Location
JGH 546
Schedule
Class meets on
  • Thursday
9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Points
2
Method of Evaluation
Other
J.D Writing Credit?
Minor (upon consultation)
Major (only upon consultation)

Learning Outcomes

Primary
  • key human rights advocacy tactics & skills
  • strategic human rights advocacy, including tactical mapping and strategies for selecting and sequencing human rights tactics
  • critiques of the international human rights field, and skills to design and implement reforms to human rights work
  • ethical frameworks and approaches to navigating common ethical dilemmas in the human rights field
  • collaborative, community-building forms of working and learning, providing constructive feedback to peers, self-assessment, and skills in contributing to clinic or other institutional growth

Course Limitations

Instructor Pre-requisites
None
Instructor Co-Requisites
None
Requires Permission
Yes
Recommended Courses
None
Other Limitations
Admission by application during the April Clinic Application period - see Law School Clinic page for more information.

Additional Section for Smith Family Human Rights Clinic

Section 001

School Year & Semester

Fall 2023

Instructors

Location

WJWH 415

Schedule

Class meets on
  • Thursday

Points

4

Section 002

Section 002

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