Columbia Law School's Beyond the Casebook initiative offers 1Ls the opportunity to discuss timely, relevant issues outside of the classroom setting. The series includes intimate faculty-student discussion lunches as well as larger-scale events organized around faculty research and publications.
Beyond the confines of the classroom, faculty join small groups of students in dialogue about legal, moral, and societal concerns.
Students gather to dissect issues in the headlines, such as racial and economic inequality, through the lens of the laws and frameworks they are learning in their first-year classes.
Alongside the first-year curriculum, students connect and form relationships with their peers in a novel educational format.
"Many 1L instructors strive to connect their course material to urgent concerns of the day, from racial injustice to economic inequality to anti-democratic developments. But there is only so much that can be covered in any given class. This lunch series offers students the opportunity to engage with faculty—and with one another—on a range of critical legal issues that cut across the curriculum, in a setting that is morally and intellectually serious while also being warm and informal."
Authoritarianism
Difficult Conversations
Drug Control Policy
Economic Inequality, Financial Regulation, and Taxation
Election Law, Integrity at the Ballot Box, and Voting Rights
Environmental Litigation and Climate Change Law
Federal Courts
Federal Immigration Policy
Human Rights
International Arbitration
Nonprofit Leadership
Presidential Immunity
Puerto Rican Statehood
Public Education in the U.S.
Reproductive Rights
Regulating AI and Big Tech
Right to Health Care
State Sovereignty and International Conflict
U.S. Supreme Court Reform
"The Beyond the Casebook series is a vibrant space for discussing the issues that brought many students to law school, including racial and economic inequality, climate change, and the future of constitutional democracy in America."