A hallway in Jerome Greene Hall has the shadows of a grid of windows on the wall.

Research Centers and Programs

  1. Faculty and Scholarship
  2. Research Centers and Programs

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.

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Law and Philosophy Program

The Law and Philosophy Program at Columbia Law School cultivates the exploration of philosophical issues surrounding legal institutions. This includes general jurisprudence (on the nature of law) and special jurisprudence (on particular areas of law), as well as the many ways in which legal institutions implicate subdisciplines of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and philosophy of mind and language. Programming includes a Law and Philosophy Workshop series during the academic year, an annual legal theory conference, and a cross-institutional, collaborative community of affiliated scholars.

Areas of Study

Project on Private Law

The Project on Private Law is a research program focused on the study and revitalization of private law—areas of law characterized by their horizontal, inter-personal structure. Private law in this understanding covers not just the traditional fields of common law obligations such as contracts, torts, and property, but also more specialized domains that embody the same horizontal structure in their working, such as intellectual property law, anti-discrimination law, and civil rights law, among others. The project aims to advance both faculty scholarship and student interest in different areas of private law by convening workshops, symposia, and seminars in the field. 

Areas of Study