Welcome Back—Spring 2024
Dean Gillian Lester shares updates and welcomes the community back from winter break.
Dear members of the Columbia Law School community,
Welcome back to campus! I hope the winter break brought you rest, reconnection, and rejuvenation. We have much to look forward to in the semester ahead—a semester imbued with a theme of forward motion.
Innovative new spring courses, seminars, and reading groups (including six in last week’s J-Term) address such wide-ranging subjects as commercial finance and derivatives, nonprofit law, drug control policy, digital economic regulation, labor rights and democracy, and the Supreme Court’s administrative law jurisprudence.
A new set of University-wide initiatives, announced just before the break by President Shafik and Interim Provost Mitchell, aims to affirm our shared values and strengthen the constitution of the Columbia community. This effort includes workshops, a “Week of Dialogue” in mid-February, and new seed grants available to faculty, students, and staff. I encourage you to participate.
Later in the semester, with more than a year of preparatory work behind us, we will break ground on the Law Library project itself—an exciting new phase of this transformative capital improvement. Stay tuned for updates on how this work will progress.
Finally, although it is bittersweet for me personally, this spring will also see the acceleration of our search for the Law School’s next dean.
My warm best wishes for a productive and enriching spring semester.
Gillian Lester
Dean and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law