Leadership Courses

Lawyer Leadership, the Initiative’s signature course, is an interactive seminar and practicum that cultivates students’ leadership capacities. From the outset of their careers, lawyers will occupy roles that call upon them to influence and persuade people, engage in difficult conversations, learn from mistakes, and interact effectively and equitably with people of different backgrounds, races, and identities. The pressing problems facing our world and the polarization of public discourse have called upon lawyers to navigate these everyday interactions in particularly challenging times that demand the ability to address problems under conditions of uncertainty, to navigate conflict and change, to strategize and innovate, and to find novel ways to connect with people. These challenges require lawyers to cultivate presence, awareness, resilience, racial literacy, and the ability to have difficult conversations. The capacities required by the current crises add up to leadership as we define it: collaborating effectively to achieve common goals.

This course will cultivate participants’ leadership capacities at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and systemic levels. It will do so through the development of concrete, practical skills while grounding students’ learning in the issues and problems that matter most to them. Students will have an opportunity to develop and advance personal learning goals that will improve their capacity to interact effectively in groups, give and receive feedback, build constructive work relationships, build racial and cultural literacy, navigate new and challenging environments, achieve collective aims, and use their law degrees to have impact in diverse practice fields. Students will pursue group impact projects that they identify as important to them and will cultivate their leadership abilities in the context of advancing those projects. Students will also have the opportunity to receive individualized feedback and peer-to-peer coaching. The course participants are encouraged to build community among the broader Law School faculty, staff, students, and alumni interested in lawyer-leadership. Students will earn five experiential learning credits. Projects past years included:

• CLS Community Growth Collective Listening Circle, a community discussion and learning forum designed to encourage individuals with diverse and divergent perspectives on a variety of topics to listen deeply, share openly, and engage in respectful, curiosity-driven dialogue without the pressure to debate or persuade;
   
• Off the Record, a student-led initiative to help Law School students develop a holistic sense of self outside of the law school by fostering engagement with non-legal topics and activities, and by creating a community to help students discover and connect over practices and ideas surrounding well-being;
   
• Bridging East to West, a network and mentorship program created to bridge the emotional and informational gap between West Coast students and East Coast law schools by providing mentorship and honest storytelling from current law students to prospective law students;
   
• Legal Equity and Access Day (LEAD), a one-day bootcamp at the Law School for high school students interested in the legal field, which included panel discussions with practitioners and law students, a mock law lecture by a Law School professor, a mock negotiation workshop, and discussions around college access and law school life; and
   
• Manhattan Courtwatch, an ongoing program that invites law students and community members to exercise their constitutional right to attend public criminal proceedings.
   

The class will meet in whole class sessions, lab groups, workshops (including two workshops outside of ordinary class and lab time), and instructional meetings. All of the sessions will be highly interactive and experiential. Students will be enrolled in a Lawyer Leadership Project Work section, based on their schedule. Students must enroll in both this course and a Lawyer Leadership Project section. Admission to Lawyer Leadership is by application, available here.

We will consider applications on a rolling basis until the course is full, but students are encouraged to submit applications by November 1. Students may be asked to participate in an interview. A course overview, along with last year’s syllabus, is available upon request. Students with questions about the course or the admissions process should email Eunice Hong ([email protected]).