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 politics and 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 (including virtually). 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 CLS faculty, staff, students, and alumni interested in lawyer-leadership. Students will earn five experiential learning credits. Projects from last year included:

• 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;

  Columbia Legal Outreach Team (LOT), a student group that started as a DPLI Fellowship Project last year, and which directly serves unhoused people in Morningside Heights and Harlem. LOT partnered with Coalition for the Homeless to do van runs to provide food and material goods to the unhoused, and also partnered with the Law School Research Library to create a comprehensive website that will provide resources to educate and assist the public;
   
• Student Orgs 102, in collaboration with the Initiative and Student Services, brought together student organization leaders at the Law School to create guidelines for facilitating the transition process of student organizations, based on a series of interviews they conducted with students and the administration;
   
• Manhattan Courtwatch,

  which was also a Fellowship project this year (as described above), is an ongoing program that invites law students and community members to exercise their constitutional right to attend public criminal proceedings. The project participants led over eighty students in joining six courtwatching sessions of arraignments at the Manhattan Criminal Court and developed a data collection form for volunteers to share their observations. They also developed a sustainability strategy for the project by establishing Courtwatch as a student group and working closely with the rising 2L leaders on the group's transition;

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]).