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. 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 from past years included:

• CLS Leading in AI Adaptation, an expansion of the DPLI Leading in AI project, that engaged in stakeholder interviews with legal practitioners and AI developers (including a partner at a large New York law firm, the managing partner of a large international law firm, and the head of product innovation at a well-known legal AI company), with the aim of translating stakeholder perspectives into proposals for actionable pathways for AI policy and programming within the Law School;
   
• Civil Procedure Through a Justice Lens, a teaching assistant-led supplementary discussion group for 1L students in Civil Procedure, with the aim of encouraging law students to critically engage with doctrinal material with a focus on justice;
   
• 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. In addition to the main seminar section, students will also be enrolled in a Lawyer Leadership Lab section, based on their schedule. Students must enroll in both the seminar and a lab section. Admission to Lawyer Leadership is by application and will be available in September 2026.

We will consider applications on a rolling basis until the course is full, but students are encouraged to submit applications by November 1. Applicants will 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]).