The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of independent-minded law students interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to the U.S. Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.
Contact: [email protected]
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Currently inactive
The Harlem Tutorial Project is a joint effort between Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School, and provides tutoring and mentoring to students at a secondary school in Harlem.
Contact: [email protected]
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The High School Law Institute provides Columbia Law students the chance to teach students from New York City high schools. The institute’s student-teachers help their students build oral advocacy and writing skills through classes in criminal law, constitutional law, moot court and mock trial. It also focuses on exploring the relevance of legal topics to students’ lives and developing students’ ability to effectively articulate their opinions.
Contact: [email protected]
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If/When/How is a national network of law students and professionals committed to promoting reproductive justice. We fight to ensure everyone can decide if, when, and how to create and sustain families with dignity—free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. The organization educates, organizes, and supports law students with extensive resources, and career and advocacy opportunities to advance reproductive justice.
Contact: [email protected]
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The Jewish Law Students Association (JLSA) is a social, cultural, educational, and religious organization that welcomes all students interested in Jewish life and culture, regardless of background or level of observance. In addition to serving as a helpful resource for Jewish students on campus, JLSA seeks to bring together and cultivate a warm, pluralistic community at CLS through events such as holiday parties and celebrations, Shabbat meals, and study breaks. JLSA also provides a place to explore the law through a Jewish lens, along with other relevant topics of interest, through educational events such as guest speakers and panel discussions.
Contact: [email protected]
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The Columbia Law and Political Economy Society is the Law School’s student-led chapter of the national Law and Political Economy Project (LPE Project), dedicated to bringing together a network of scholars, practitioners, and students to develop innovative intellectual, pedagogical, and political interventions to advance the study and practice of the law.
Specifically, we are students concerned by the law’s role in facilitating ballooning inequality and economic precarity, political alienation, the entrenchment of racial hierarchies and intersectional exploitation, and ecological and social catastrophe. We aim to reverse these trends by promoting and engaging with work that traces and identifies these legal iniquities, and that develops ideas and proposals to democratize our political economy and build a more just, equal, and sustainable future.
We are an intellectual and social forum that allows Columbia students to critically examine the economic and political assumptions embedded in the law, and simultaneously, the role that law plays in creating and maintaining unjust hierarchies of class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as ecologically unsustainable economic systems.
For more information on future events and how to get involved:
Contact: [email protected].
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Manhattan Courtwatch intends to cultivate a culture of “sousveillance” or “watching from below.” Court watchers across the country challenge institutional ideas of justice and safety by attending courtrooms to draw attention to the systemic harms caused by criminal punishment and the legal system and to ensure the presence of the community is felt by the court.
Manhattan Courtwatch arranges for volunteers to attend sessions at Manhattan Criminal Court. Volunteers fill out data forms while at court and the data is used in abolition focused advocacy efforts. Volunteers are eligible to record the hours they spend on the project as pro bono hours.
Contact: Jacob Turner [email protected]
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Mentoring Youth through Legal Education is a debate coaching program at Columbia Law School, which functions as the law student-run portion of Legal Outreach. Legal Outreach prepares youth from underserved communities in New York City to compete at high academic levels by using intensive legal and educational programs as tools for fostering vision, developing skills, enhancing confidence, and facilitating the pursuit of higher education.
Contact: [email protected]
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The National Lawyers Guild is the nation’s oldest and largest progressive bar association and was the first one in the US to be racially integrated. Our mission is to use law for the people, uniting lawyers, law students, legal workers, and jailhouse lawyers to function as an effective force in the service of the people by valuing human rights over property interests. The NLG is dedicated to the need for basic change in the structure of our political and economic system. Our aim is to bring together all those who recognize the importance of safeguarding and extending the rights of workers, women, LGBTQ people, farmers, people with disabilities and people of color, upon whom the welfare of the entire nation depends; who seek actively to eliminate racism; who work to maintain and protect our civil rights and liberties in the face of persistent attacks upon them; and who look upon the law as an instrument for the protection of the people, rather than for their repression.
Contact: [email protected]
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The Parole Advocacy Project collaborates with attorneys to help incarcerated clients prepare for their parole hearings. Student advocates work in teams to compile parole packets, develop reentry plans and help their clients prepare for parole interviews. The project will also organize mutual aid campaigns and facilitate other abolition-centered advocacy.
Contact: [email protected]
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