Columbia Law School’s innovative Policy Labs prepare our graduates to thrive in these settings. Policy Labs combine cutting-edge theory with hands-on learning, policy, and practice; litigation and transactional work; seminar-style, larger-class, and small-group settings; and live client as well as simulation experiences. They enable law students to work in teams with each other, with professionals from other fields, and with the communities they serve. Students work and learn together with faculty, advocates, government officials, and community leaders who have joined together to solve challenging problems that require ongoing learning and a wide range of expertise.
Current Policy Lab Offerings
Structural Change in Public Education is an immersive full-semester program bringing together graduate and professional students from around the country to study and gain hands-on experience helping public education systems achieve the systemic legal and policy change needed to improve educational equity in the US and Brazil. For more information, visit our website.
Lawyer Leadership: Leading Self, Leading Others, Leading Change course promotes effective leadership by helping students to understand themselves and their impact on others, to work effectively in groups, to interact across difference, to navigate uncertainty and changing legal environments, and to advance change. For more information, visit the class blog.
Empirical Legal Studies Lab, a laboratory for intensive legal research, is a faculty-student research partnership designed to conduct data-intensive law or practice-related investigations, develop specialized technical skills, and produce original scholarship. For information about the application procedure, email Professor Fagan at [email protected].
Courses tagged experiential credit can be found in the Curriculum Guide.