This seminar is intended to provide students with an interest in international humanitarian law (IHL) with an opportunity to undertake indepth research, and write a substantial paper, on key issues in IHL. Potential topics include thresholds for the application of IHL, the interface of IHL with human rights law and domestic law, the protection of civilians and non-combatants from the effects of conflict, the application of IHL protections to unprivileged belligerents, the standards for detention under IHL, including both permissible duration and treatment, emerging trends regulating the use of lethal force as a first resort under IHL, arms control and IHL (landmines, cluster munitions, autonomous weapons), the application of IHL to cyber “warfare”, U.S. interpretation of customary and treaty IHL, the efficacy of IHL in current conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and other topics. Building upon a foundation of assigned readings on core IHL topics, the professors and students will tailor classroom work to coincide with the students’ research projects. Students will be expected to participate actively in class and to share their own research during the semester with other students.

Students will receive individualized feedback from the professors on outlines and drafts of their paper, as well as an opportunity to present their paper to the professors and other students in class to help identify issues and sharpen their analysis.

Learning objectives:

Through a structured process, to develop a scholarly paper on international humanitarian law, we aim to give the student, working closely with the professor, an opportunity to explore his or her topic in depth and to write a paper worthy of publication in a law journal.

This course is designed for students embarking on careers in public interest law or policy and explores the many necessary techniques to become highly effective advocates for social change. The purpose of the class is to help class participants develop creative advocacy approaches and learn to think beyond litigation and other traditional legal strategies to meet key client and societal goals. In particular, the course will: 1) explore how coalition building, grassroots organizing, and public policy advocacy can be used to enhance legal strategies; 2) teach basic public interest advocacy skills, including media relations, fundraising basics, legislative advocacy and lobbying, leveraging data and research, social marketing and public opinion, and cutting-edge digital strategies; and 3) introduce students to dynamic experts in relevant issue areas, from lobbyists to communications experts. Using compelling case studies and background reading materials, students will have the opportunity to use multiple advocacy tools to tackle real-life social problems on the local and national levels. Grades will be based on the extent and quality of class participation and written assignments.

The current fierce conflict between Israel and Hamas highlights an important feature of the modern world: the vast majority of hostilities since World War II have been between states and nonstate armed groups. These include insurgencies against states such as such as Northern Ireland, Colombia, Israel, Turkey, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Yemen, and many others. They also involve conflicts between states and transnational terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Hezbollah.

These hostilities call into question the assumptions that are the foundations of the post-World War II international regulation of force designed to provide greater protection for human rights, especially the right to life. The legal system governing state use of military force is based on the assumption that the greatest threat to life is armed conflicts between states, known as international armed conflicts. This legal regime, known as International Humanitarian Law (IHL), therefore sets forth detailed rules regarding protection of the right to life during armed conflict between states, with only minimal reference to hostilities between states and nonstate armed groups. The assumption is that state use of force to protect life from violence by private actors will involve police operations against criminal behavior, which is governed by International Human Rights Law (IHRL).

This gives rise to a clear division of regulation: IHRL governs state response to nonstate criminal threats to life during peacetime, while IHL governs state response to threats to life posed by other states during war.  Each legal regime protects threats to life that may arise both from others and from the state. Each does this in a distinctive way by imposing significantly different limits on state use of lethal force. 

The assumptions of the post-war system for regulating state use of force, however, do not easily apply to most conflicts since World War II.  This gives rise to several difficult questions.

First, at what point may a state conclude that it needs to resort to military force against nonstate groups because police operations governed by IHRL are ineffective? In other words, when do hostilities evolve from crime or social disturbances to what is known as a non-international armed conflict (NIAC) that requires the conduct of military operations governed by IHL?

Second, IHL provides detailed guidance on state use of military force against other states, but says very little about state use of force during a NIAC.  Where should states turn for guidance in the absence of explicit regulation? Should they apply provisions of IHL by analogy? Should they rely on IHRL because the threat comes from private groups?  Or are conflicts with nonstate armed groups sufficiently distinctive that other rules should apply? If so, what is the source of such rules?  Should it matter whether a NIAC is solely internal or whether it crosses state boundaries?

Third, it is now widely accepted that regulation of states by IHRL to protect human rights does not cease during armed conflict, but that IHRL and IHL are both applicable during wartime. How must a state reconcile these two divergent legal regimes when using force in an armed conflict?  Is it realistic to harmonize such dramatically different sets of rules?  Or can each body of law make its own distinctive contribution to protecting the right to life during wartime in ways that complement one another?

These are questions at the cutting edge of international law regarding the use of force. The course will draw on case studies from several hostilities, including US counterterrorism activities against transnational terrorist organizations; the conflict between Israel and Palestinian non-state groups; the 30-year hostilities between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland; the 50-year conflict between Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC); and the ongoing violence involving Mexico and the drug cartels.

In sum, the predominance of hostilities between states and nonstate groups in the modern world requires complex sophisticated judgments by decision-makers and lawyers about how to use force. States must protect life from violence by others, but must do so in ways that minimize state infringement on life. This course will give students an appreciation of this challenge and explore how best to meet it in order to protect the right to life from violence both by non-state armed groups and by the state itself.  New events that illustrate the issues in the course undoubtedly will arise during the semester, and discussion of these will be incorporated into the course.

Learning Objectives:

Learning objectives for the course are for students to become familiar with:

(1) basic concepts in international human rights law, United Nations and European Conventions on basic human rights, and their impacts on domestic law;

(2) basic provisions of international law that deal with when states may use military force, and international law governing how such force may be used in armed conflict; and

(3) based on your understanding of the subjects described above, for students to appreciate how many contemporary conflicts with non-state groups present challenges that do not fall squarely within either international human rights law or the international law governing military force.  This means that students must be able to think creatively about how best to protect human life in the setting of complex modern conflicts.

This course will provide an overview of the field of Business and Human Rights, while affording students an opportunity to work in organizations that are addressing issues in the field in various ways.  This is a rapidly emerging field characterized by viewing the adverse impacts of business operations through the lens of human rights principles.  There is no single form of regulation or regulatory authority, and only a handful of potentially enforceable legal obligations.  Instead, there are a variety of different types of initiatives and programs that depend upon the type of rights at issue, the business sector involved, and the nature and location of the business activities that cause adverse impacts.  This means that there are significant opportunities for creative approaches to produce meaningful change.

We will examine how the modern global corporation is organized around extensive supply chains, the ways in which its formal legal structure can enable it to avoid responsibility for the full range of impacts that it creates, and the successes and limitations of attempts to address this problem through litigation. We will then turn to the emergence of the concept of human rights as a key conceptual tool in the effort to surmount the limits of conventional litigation and regulatory strategies. This will involve discussion of incidents that served as the impetus for this development, and the human rights instruments that provide the basis for human rights claims.

We will then examine in depth some of the types of impacts that can constitute rights violations, relating to concerns such as forced labor, human trafficking, unsafe working conditions and wage theft, physical abuse, forcible displacement, environmental degradation, child labor, sex discrimination, freedom of expression, privacy, and climate change.  We will also examine ways in which women in the global economy may be especially vulnerable to such harms.

This will provide an opportunity to examine the range of responses to these abuses and their effectiveness, such as voluntary industry standards; mandatory human rights due diligence; guidelines established by international organizations such as the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the International Labor Organization; mandatory and voluntary disclosure provisions; international finance standards; international trade law, and other measures.

Students will also learn about issues that are distinctive to particular economic sectors, such as apparel, energy exploration, mining, financial services, and information and communications technology industries. Finally, we will focus on how businesses can incorporate human rights concerns into their operations in order to comply with the duty of respect articulated by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

With respect to learning objectives, the seminar portion of the practicum is intended to acquaint you with:

(1) some of the most significant types of adverse impacts that business operations can impose;

(2) the debate over the extent to which changes in corporate production processes and liberalized trade law have contributed to such impacts;

(3) the major sources of human rights protections for persons who suffer such impacts; and

(4) the range of initiatives that are emerging to protect against and respond to business violations of human rights.

FIELDWORK: Students will be placed with organizations in the Washington, DC area that are involved in working on business and human rights issues. These may include NGOs, corporations, bar associations, human rights consulting firms, and international organizations. Students will work on a variety of types of projects that further the mission of their particular organizations. These may include legal research; advising, training, and educating community groups; gathering information on the effectiveness of voluntary standards; compiling information on adverse human impacts of different types of activities or in different sectors; helping to devise remedies for human rights violations; preparing staff for and participating in meetings with government, business, and/or non-profits organizations; helping advise on possible legislation; submitting reports to international organizations; helping with human rights due diligence efforts; and others.

Note: F-1 and J-1 international students must consult with an international student advisor before enrolling in this course. Please email lawcentervisa@georgetown.edu.

Corporations today have a global scale as well as an impact that matches or sometimes exceeds that of governments. Their activities -- from sourcing of raw materials, to processing and production of intermediate or finished goods, to distribution and sale -- have major consequences not only for the human rights of their employees but also for the rights of the individuals and communities impacted by their operations. In many countries, government regulation and oversight are either absent or largely ineffective. Companies in turn struggle to define their responsibilities in the face of these "governance gaps" -- particularly where requirements under national law fall short of international standards in areas such as hours of work and safety and healthy.

A robust and often contentious debate over these issues culminated in the development of the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (the “UNGPs”) under the leadership of Special Representative John Ruggie. These Principles establish a framework for considering the respective roles of governments and corporations and outline core concepts of human rights due diligence and effective remedy. In doing so, the UNGPs also inform and to some extent refocus efforts that have emerged over the past 20 years to address these governance gaps and have brought together stakeholders from business, labor, civil society, the investment community, and academia.

At the same time, in recent years there has been an increased push from civil society groups and certain governments to go beyond these "voluntary" efforts and develop a binding business and human rights treaty mechanism; this has met with strong opposition from business and many other governments, including the United States.

Even as "non-regulatory" approaches remain the predominant means of addressing various business and human rights challenges, there also has been a growing focus in recent years on tools through which national governments and international institutions could exercise greater leverage. This includes advocacy for stronger labor and other human rights language in trade agreements, one-way trade preference programs, procurement standards, and the rules and guidelines applied by international financial institutions -- coupled with more aggressive enforcement of those criteria. Expanded efforts to advance that "regulatory" approach in trade policy and elsewhere in some cases has been met with resistance from governments and business, but there also have been examples of emerging consensus among a diverse range of stakeholders.

This course introduces students to this quickly-evolving business and human rights landscape, including the diverse set of multi-stakeholder initiatives -- some, but not all, of which include government participation. We will discuss the guidance provided by the UNGPs and other instruments, the range of stakeholders and how they engage with one another, tools utilized by governments and corporations to implement human rights standards, and how all of these interact in the context of both sector-specific and cross-cutting legal and policy challenges.

Among the questions the course will examine are:

• Which human rights standards are most relevant to business?
• What are the appropriate linkages between business policies and practices and the promotion of human rights?
• Which business and human rights approaches are emerging as “best practices" and perhaps even as recognized norms?
• What tools to support those are being used by governments and corporations?
• Who are the principal stakeholders and what are their roles and objectives?
• What are the strategies for addressing business and human rights "governance gaps" at the national and international levels?
• What are the opportunities for increased integration of labor/human rights and trade policies, and what are the limitations?
• What mix of mandatory/regulatory and voluntary/“self-regulatory” approaches has been utilized in different situations to advance human rights objectives? Which approaches have been most effective?
• How are various business and human rights challenges playing out in specific sectors, and how do these inform the debate about different approaches?

To address these and other key questions, the course will begin with several sessions setting out the relevant legal and policy developments, with special attention to the UNGPs. It will also include a review of different stakeholders and their roles and interests, and examination of concepts of corporate responsibility and corporate accountability, and an analysis of the various approaches to business and human rights advanced by companies, governments, labor, civil society, and through multi-stakeholder initiatives. The second half of the semester will then focus on how these concepts are being applied in particular sectors to address specific business and human rights challenges.

Throughout the course, students will be asked to examine the various approaches and differing roles of key stakeholders, including by playing the roles of those addressing the key issues from the perspectives of corporations, civil society and unions, and governments. The class will be divided into three groups for purposes of this “role playing” -- with each asked to adopt all three perspectives during the course of the semester, both in students’ individual analyses of assigned readings and in group sessions during certain classes.

Learning Objectives:

Introduction to business and human rights landscape, including legal and policy developments, particularly the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The course reviews different stakeholders and roles, examines concepts of corporate responsibility and accountability, and analyzes various approaches to business and human rights advanced by stakeholders. The course will also familiarize students with sector specific business and human rights challenges.

The relationship between business, human rights, and sustainability has gained momentum in recent years with the private sector, governments, civil society, and international organizations, owing largely to the passage of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP) in 2011, the 2012 UN Rio + 20 Sustainable Development Conference and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015). These developments were preceded and followed by a series of multi stakeholder (governments, private sector, investors, civil society networks and organizations) and specific industry driven initiatives looking at how to integrate these international standards into both self and binding regulatory processes. As a result, many of these initiatives led to an emerging international soft law system of business, human rights and sustainability that is based in the internationally acknowledged body of hard law principles.

Regardless of being industry, sector specific or multi stakeholder in nature, the regulation, de-regulation, policy, practice and ever growing global litigation in this new field of practice is multifaceted, dynamic, interactive, complex and challenges business leaders, markets and even lawyers to think outside the box in order to address a challenging relationship between business, markets and society. This is where business strategy meets risks. Or instead, this is where risks eat a business strategy.  As a result, business leaders, shareholders and their advisors are now required to integrate a 3D internal and external view and assessment on how to address, prevent, mitigate and remediate the social and environmental impacts (risks) of private sector operations in complex environments and with a collaborative and systems thinking approach.

Bar Associations in America and abroad have begun issuing specific guidance on how corporate lawyers should advice their clients incorporating human rights and sustainability standards. For instance, in a Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) transaction, corporate lawyers are most likely to encounter questions dealing with social, environmental, human rights and environmental concerns. Those advocating on behalf of environmental and human rights organizations will find their work directly intersects with company law, securities law, investment law, governance, compliance, company law and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms to name a few sub areas.

Fast-forward 2020. The global COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly entered this space. It has done so highlighting the vulnerabilities and opportunities in the relationship between business, governments and society across the globe. Furthermore, the global pandemic is challenging all stakeholders not only to become relevant but to re-think, re-imagine and re-envision new models that seek engagement, resilience, addressing grievances, investment, economic recovery and accountability frameworks.

In practice, these global and ever growing litigation trends are also challenging traditional company-led corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethics programs that have been associated with both philanthropic, corporate citizenship and company-sponsored activities that give back to societies. While many of these programs have achieved several levels of success, for many sectors in society they remain as corporate public relations or green wash exercises and demand more transparent, accountable and remediation responses.  The stakes are high.

Litigation, a growing movement towards mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence and reporting requirements and other types of social demands are challenging companies to be very purposeful and accountable on how they address the environmental, social and governance negative impacts (for some) or violations (for others) of their operations globally and domestically. Stakeholders are asking companies to integrate ongoing due diligence processes that address materiality concerns when it comes to managing supply chains and making sure they are free of child labor, modern slavery and human trafficking. They are also asking companies to address the social and environmental impacts of extraction of natural resources above and below ground, to name a few. 

Furthermore, stakeholders are not alone on this. The emerging and growing movement of shareholder advocacy is leading the way across industries and pushing the way through different strategies for more corporate engagements that drive responsible business conduct and standard-setting activities that push for robust business, human rights and sustainability policies embedded as part of corporate operations across systems and functions. In particular, a wide range of investors that include asset management firms, trade union funds, public pension funds, foundations, endowments, faith-based organizations and family funds are leveraging their assets of over US$3.5 trillion to collaborate around responsible investment while influencing boards and management.

At the conclusion of this course, students will demonstrate the capability:

• To distinguish between relevant applications of the Business, Human Rights and Sustainability frameworks of international hard and soft laws, in the context of environmental, social and human rights challenges across industries and different actors and how they can be integrated into the business strategy.
• To assess critical human rights, environment and natural resources challenges currently faced by industries and markets in different contexts through a multi stakeholder and 3D lens risk management approach.
• To analyze and discuss how different tools and resources can be applied and be relevant to address human rights and environmental challenges, which tools would be best suited for specific contexts and grievance mechanisms that exist for access to remedy across relevant and selected industries (policy development, stakeholder forums and facilitation, influence and development, multi stakeholder assessments, human rights due diligence and environmental assessments) in international development, conflict and post-conflict environments.

“Criminal law across borders” studies two bodies of law. One is domestic (national) criminal law applied to crimes committed outside national territory. The other is crimes under international law: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and aggression. These are the “core crimes” tried by courts like the Nuremberg Tribunal, the tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Along with the substantive law on these issues, we examine procedural law on topics such as jurisdiction and immunity from prosecution. As a 1L course, it will introduce basic doctrines of criminal law and international law. The course will also examine the problems confronting international criminal justice today, including the political backlash against holding leaders accountable for core crimes. The aim is to introduce students to basic doctrines of international criminal law, as well as doctrines concerning the extraterritorial application of U.S. criminal law. The course combines law, policy, and history.

Please note that we will read about and discuss some difficult issues in this course, including genocide, torture, sexual violence, and legal issues in current ongoing armed conflicts, including the Russia-Ukraine war and Israel’s conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah.

Lawyers, regardless of their practice area, need to be able to negotiate and communicate effectively—to resolve disputes, make deals, solve problems, promote the public interest, persuade judges, juries, bosses, and colleagues, and assist clients in navigating legal systems.

Human rights are humanity's greatest ethical, moral, and legal capital. Seventy-five years ago, reeling from the devastation of world war, States came together to agree on a blueprint for preventing future cataclysms—respect for human rights—and codified that plan in foundational documents like the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rights detailed in the UDHR—which encompass civil and political rights, like the right to free expression and a fair trial, and economic, social, and cultural rights, like the right to adequate food and housing—were seen as interdependent, indivisible, and mutually reinforcing: no right should be privileged above another.

But it wasn’t long before the ideological divide of the Cold War fractured this consensus, with the West generally prioritizing civil and political rights and the Soviet bloc generally emphasizing economic and social rights.

This course will explore the negative impact of that artificial division, which resulted in the demotion of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR) to “second generation” rights, with scant enforceability and justiciability, and the urgency of repairing the breach, particularly in the context of the climate emergency. The course will situate economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights (ESCER) in the international and regional human rights systems, with a special focus on the Inter-American system. The course will then examine in detail a number of specific ESCER, with an emphasis on the impact violations of these rights have on women, indigenous people, people of African descent and other populations in situations of vulnerability or historically discriminated against. The course will examine the contours of the right to a healthy environment and will explore the role and responsibilities of business and other economic actors in upholding such rights.

Learning Objectives:

Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights, including current developments and controversies surrounding these rights. Students will be able to identify tools and gaps in the national and international realization of rights such as the rights to clean water and sanitation, health, education, housing, work, and a healthy environment.

The course will also train students to craft persuasive arguments for the legal defense of these rights at national and international levels and to advocate on key issues, such as the climate emergency and the obligation of corporate due diligence.

Students will learn to apply the principles of universality, indivisibility, and interdependence, with a gender and intersectional approach, to the analysis of ESCER.

Students will get a unique insider’s look at high-level advocacy for ESCER. I will share some of my own field experiences during the course and students will also have the opportunity to hear from some distinguished guest speakers.

Finally, this course aims to provide students not only with exposure to the legal principles underlying ESCER but a deep understanding of the impact of violations of these rights on the most historically discriminated populations. Exploration of each course topic will include the perspectives of people and communities most impacted by the lack of access and enjoyment of ESCER. This approach is designed to help build a community of practice and solidarity that will live on beyond the course.

This is an advanced course on constitutional principles bearing on U.S. foreign relations: primarily, separation of powers, federalism and judicial review of Executive acts and Congressional legislation. It focuses on some of the most challenging issues that have divided the American polity from the inception of the Republic and continue to do so today, e.g., the allocation of foreign affairs power between the Executive and Congress; the scope of Presidential power to protect the nation in times of danger; and the proper role of the courts in deciding legal issues relating to national security.  We will study historical materials that inform the legal arguments on both sides of current controversies over Presidential and Congressional power and discuss foreign relations issues under judicial review in 2024. We also study the power to make treaties and executive agreements, the Supremacy clause and application of customary international law by U.S. courts.

In fieldwork practicum courses, students participate in weekly seminars and conduct related fieldwork at outside organizations. This fieldwork practicum course will focus on governmental protection for persons fleeing gender-based persecution and abuse. Students will participate in a two hour/week seminar and ten hours/week of fieldwork with law firms and nonprofit organizations in the D.C. metro area to assist lawyers representing clients fleeing their countries due to gender-related violence.

SEMINAR: In the two-credit, graded seminar portion of the practicum, students will discuss how shifting migration patterns and societal forces have caused more women and sexual minorities to leave their home countries and immigrate to the United States. In many countries, individuals face persecution and violence on account of their gender. This includes the use of rape as a weapon of war, domestic violence, so-called honor crimes, forced marriage, widow rituals, one child policies, forced sterilization policies, and female genital mutilation. During the seminar, students will study and learn through experience about the societal forces causing the forced migration of women and sexual minorities and how U.S. laws and policies address the immigration status of these immigrants. We will focus on forms of relief that, while available to both men and women, are primarily accessed by women and members of the LGBTQ+ community to obtain legal status in the United States. Specifically, we will focus on: asylum, withholding of removal, protection under the Convention Against Torture, the Violence against Women Act, U Visas, and T Visas.

FIELDWORK: In the two-credit, mandatory pass/fail fieldwork portion of the practicum, students will work with lawyers from law firms and nonprofit agencies on real cases of immigrants fleeing their countries because of gender-based violence. Students will be assigned in teams to interview clients, prepare research and briefs, and assist the principal lawyer conducting the case. Students will also work directly with attorneys at local legal service agencies who are representing survivors of gender-based harm seeking legal status in the United States.

In recent years, the U.S. has developed a comprehensive policy framework that recognizes gender equality as a pillar of U.S. foreign policy and international law. This class will introduce and analyze these policies, including the U.S. National Security Strategy; Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017; U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally; U.S. Strategy on Women’s Economic Security; State Department and USAID policy guidance on gender. We will examine the legal basis for women's human rights, as well as the body of evidence linking women's advancement to development, prosperity, and stability. Issues covered will include gender and economic growth, peace and security, political participation, development, gender-based violence, and international institutions and treaties. This class will feature prominent guest speakers in the field.

Global Health Law is the flagship course offered by Georgetown University Law Center’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. This course is open to both Georgetown JD and LLM students and is compulsory for students in the National and Global Health Law LLM and the Global Health Law and Governance LLM.

The survey course explores the roles that the law, lawyers, and legal institutions play in public health across the globe. Global health law encompasses international law and policy that directly or indirectly affects health, including treaties, regulations, strategies, and expert guidelines. This course provides a strong foundation in these instruments, laws and policies, including topics such as governance of the World Health Organization, Universal Health Coverage, the International Health Regulations, the role of the UN Special Rapporteur on Health, and the proposed accord on  global pandemic preparedness. The course also explores comparative national approaches to health governance, law, and policy.

The course is divided into three modules. Module 1 covers the foundations of global health law, providing overviews of public international law, international human rights law, international trade law, and the intersections between intellectual property law and health. Module 2 covers health systems and governance, including the World Health Organization, and public health ethics and principles. Module 3 addresses the human right to health and other key emerging topics in health law such as environmental law and health, the global campaign for Universal Health coverage, and the use of litigation to advance the right to health. The course culminates in students presenting proposals to reform international law to better protect and promote global and public health outcomes.

Students will hear from leading voices in global health law and benefit from the expertise of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, as well as other resources at Georgetown University and in the broader Washington, DC community.

Course Goals/Student Learning Outcomes

1. Knowledge of the substantive foundations of global health law, including public international law; human rights law; global health governance; the interface between international trade and intellectual property law and health; and principles of public health law.
2. Knowledge of the legal issues related to a range of global health challenges, including access to health care and prevention and control of non-communicable diseases and infectious diseases.
3. Knowledge of the various roles that lawyers can play in advancing global health, including legal drafting, negotiating, litigation, and advocacy for law reform.
4. Ability to use various skills relied upon by global health lawyers, including legal research, analysis and writing, strategic thinking, and communication. 

This course analyzes the subject matter of global health security as it is shaped by international agreements and national implementation and preparedness laws. As societies and economies are increasingly interwoven and interdependent, new forms of health security threats have arisen, and nations are now contending with such implications through established agreements like the International Health Regulations (2005), a draft new pandemic agreement, and various forms of “soft power” diplomacy to mitigate infectious disease risks. In recent years, the realm of health security has expanded greatly with more governments, companies, and NGOs working to solve problems and pursue opportunities. Most prominently, the COVID-19 pandemic has shattered existing paradigms of stability and security, with ramifications from the global perspective down to that of nearly every world citizen. Over an immersive weekend of overview and interaction, this course highlights prominent threat categories, namely the “3-D threats” of Disaster, Disease, and Disorder. This seminar will be devoted as an active legal laboratory in which student ideas are solicited and shaped with the participation of the class.

The objective of the course is to crystallize student understanding at the international, national, and local legal level, the perspective viewed by national and organizational leaderships, and to frame student thinking by developing a broad, contextual understanding of the situation of health security. The course will draw connections between direct experience with purposeful intent through class exercises. Practical frameworks will be employed to simplify the dynamics within complex situations, and to organize student thinking about actions and options. An overnight simulation activity assessing a humanitarian crisis between the first and second day invites analysis about cause-effect, goals-intentions, and interventions-consequences. Two special guest speakers will share experiences on the policy frontlines, further enriching classroom dialogue. The course relies on active participation that feeds a mutual learning environment and that catalyzes and reveals students’ ideas as they occur, thereby fostering an at-the-ready style of nimble thinking and conversing.

Around the world, people are mobilizing to defend democracy, protect human rights, and promote sustainable development. We’ll study the international legal framework for civic activism, examining laws governing protests, social justice movements, and and nonprofit organizations. We’ll also explore the impact of national security, authoritarianism, and digital technology on civic space.

We'll take a global tour, comparing approaches in the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. We'll discuss current events, play the role of UN Ambassadors, and help countries draft laws.

This class will provide skills and contacts to help you pursue a career in international human rights law. Past classes have spoken with UN officials, a lawyer for a group allegedly engaged in terrorism, and frontline human rights defenders.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of the semester, you should have the ability to:

1. Analyze international law governing the freedoms of association, assembly, and expression;
2. Evaluate the extent to which national legislation complies with international law;
3. Craft arguments to bring national legislation closer to international law and good practice;
4. Communicate effectively with diplomats, government officials, and civic activists;
5. Analyze ethical aspects that arise in crafting laws that affect the freedoms of association, assembly, and expression; and
6. Assess the impact of law on nonprofit organizations, social movements, and protests.

This course explores the potential of using the law, and specifically, the human rights legal framework, to improve health. Students will be exposed to real life projects at the domestic level in a number of different jurisdictions, especially but not exclusively from Latin-America and Africa; as well as at the regional and international level, including the Inter-American Human Rights System and the United Nations Human Rights System. With this approach, students will strengthen not only their knowledge of the human rights framework within their familiar jurisdictions, but will also have the opportunity to develop comparative legal research skills.

The human rights framework that students will learn in depth in this practicum is not limited to the right to health but involves other related human rights that are also social determinants of health or that are instrumental to the effective realization of the right to health. Therefore, students will be exposed to the substantive expertise needed to successfully practice the strategic use of the integrality of the human rights framework in the specific context of health. Students will also be required to consider the use of other legal frameworks that have the potential of having a positive impact on health outcomes.

The variety of projects will take into consideration the complexity and different dimensions of the right to health as well as the nature of the legal obligations that it imposes in different contexts. We will offer projects that respond to current and pressing global challenges with respect to health, for example, projects exploring the right to health and other rights in the context of public health emergencies, the link between health and the environment, the structural disadvantage that specific groups face with respect to their health and the role of private actors, to name a few.

For the execution of their projects, students will work with external partners of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, in particular, the Health and Human Rights Initiative. (“HHRI”).

The Muslim view is that the origins of Islamic legal code are rooted in the Muslim holy text (the Quran) and Sunna (the portion of Muslim law based on the prophet Mohammed’s words or acts), and it is this jurisprudence that gives Islamic religious practice its connection and sustainability in everything including health law and policy.

This seminar provides an overview of where Islam as a rule of law and global health intersect through subject specific segments. The seminar will start by exploring Islamic law and the history of healthcare under Islamic law and move into segments that discuss food hygiene jurisprudence, prophetic medicine as Sunna, bioethics and Islam, mental health and Islamic law, migrant health and Islamic law, and finally sexual, reproductive and human rights under Islamic law. It presupposes the Quran and Sunna as the legal documents and where relevant, the seminar will discuss comparative aspects to western perspectives.

This seminar supports the notion that global health law is part of a growing health diplomacy where it becomes vital to understand key aspects of how culture and religion can influence health, policy and the law locally and globally.

How can lawyers advocate effectively for solutions to pressing human rights challenges?

This project-based practicum enlists students in tackling real-world human rights challenges and creates a learning environment that equips students to analyze a problem, assess the legal and policy situation, and propose and execute strategies for change.

Students in this practicum receive intensive instruction from law professors and subject matter experts on both the relevant human rights law as well as effective strategies and tactics for human rights advocacy. Professor Massimino has a distinguished record of human rights advocacy and led Human Rights First, one of the nation’s leading human rights advocacy organizations, as president and CEO before coming to Georgetown Law. Michelle Liu is an adjunct professor and has supported partner NGOs in several countries to promote women’s and children’s human rights through litigation and legislative reform. Melody Vidmar is the 2024–2026 Dash-Muse Senior Teaching Fellow and Supervising Attorney and has represented clients in all aspects of complex civil rights and liberties impact litigation before federal and state courts. Together with their professors and fellow classmates, students collaborate on a project that supports the mission and objectives of a chosen NGO partner of the Human Rights Institute (HRI). This collaboration gives students a unique opportunity to conduct legal and factual research, craft legal solutions, and develop an advocacy campaign with real-world impact. 

In partnership with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), the 2024-2025 Human Rights Advocacy in Action Practicum will explore avenues to advance Haiti’s case for restitution for its “independence debt,” a payment that Haiti’s former French colonial masters forced Haiti to pay in exchange for freedom from slavery and colonial rule. The catastrophic impacts of the independence debt on Haiti’s development and additional vestiges of colonialism on the Haitian economy and society continue to reverberate today. In addition to developing the case for restitution of this historic injustice, the Practicum will highlight the integral role Haiti’s restitution claim plays in the broader reparations movement. For more information about the project and partner organization, please visit HRI’s Practicum website here.

The practicum is a year-long course and comprises three mandatory components: a two-hour weekly seminar, project-related teamwork performed in and outside of class, and a week-long field investigation (likely involving international travel) during Week One in January 2025. 

Seminar

The seminar portion of the practicum will cover the substantive law and legal framework as it pertains to a particular human rights issue. Students will also use seminar time to propose and assess what legal remedies and accountability mechanisms may be appropriate and viable to address the human rights violation. Guest speakers with subject matter expertise may be invited to seminars to hold workshops and offer critique of student work. Finally, the seminar will also be the training ground for students to develop their critical thinking, public speaking, and persuasive writing skills through the formulation of a human rights advocacy campaign.

Project Work

Students will work in teams to complete a human rights project that furthers the mission of HRI’s partner organization. Depending on the particulars of the project, students may engage in any or all of the following:

• conduct fact-based research on a human rights issue,
• learn about the international human rights framework pertaining to the issue,
• identify the legal gaps and barriers that are impeding justice, accountability, or the realization of human rights,
• assess viable remedies and solutions to addressing such legal gap or barrier,
• propose changes to legislation or draft a legal brief or policy report, and
• develop a multimodal strategic campaign for human rights advocacy.

Field Investigation

Students will have the opportunity to conduct project-related field investigation during Week One. Students will have mandatory full-day obligations from Monday, January 6 through Friday, January 10, 2025. The field investigation may involve international travel to interview or consult with stakeholders, human rights advocates, community leaders, lawmakers, or other relevant individuals working on the ground. While the Practicum will not be traveling to Haiti, we will be working with IJDH to identify a field investigation location that will best serve the needs of the project. More details about the field investigation component of the course will be discussed and established in the fall semester.

Students will be required to complete the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) Program for ethical human subject research before Week One. Students must also have a valid passport with at least six months remaining from the first day of spring semester classes.

Learning Objectives

As a result of completing this practicum, students will be able to approach a human rights issue from the perspective of a legal advocate who is equipped to effect change.

Students will learn how to conduct desk research on human rights violations, as well as how to assess violations of human rights using international and regional treaties, international court jurisprudence, and other sources of law. Students will also learn how to conduct first-person interviews and/or meetings in a cross-cultural context.

Students will learn how to identify legal and political barriers that impede justice, accountability, and the realization of human rights. By working together with law professors and subject matter experts to formulate a viable, impactful, and victim-centric advocacy plan, students will develop the critical thinking and communication skills needed to become effective human rights advocates.

Credits

This is a seven-credit course. Three credits will be awarded in the fall—two for the seminar and one for the approximately five hours of project work per week, for a minimum of 11 weeks. Four credits will be awarded in the spring—one for Week One, two for the seminar, and one for the approximately five hours of project work per week, for a minimum of 11 weeks. Both the seminar portion and the project portion will be graded. The field investigation is an integral and required portion of the course. Students should consider their individual capacity to work cross-culturally with individuals who have experienced or are experiencing ongoing human rights violations. Permission to miss the Week One field-work portion of the course will be granted only in exceptional circumstances, such as a sudden illness or death in the family.

While the public tends to think about capital punishment in relation to a high court's ruling to prevent or allow an execution to go forward, the broader campaign to expose the flaws in the practice of capital punishment and to end the death penalty involves a complex interplay of strategies--federal and state legislative advocacy, strategic communications, and community organizing and litigation. Indeed, nearly every human rights challenge requires a combination strategy, with many moving parts that have different targets, different tactics, and require different skills. How does an advocate know which strategies are appropriate for which challenges?  How can you best prepare for some of the thorniest, most entrenched challenges to human rights? What tools are available to you?  And what if the combination of strategies creates ethical or other tensions? This course will explore the various ways in which litigation and policy advocacy can work together to bring about transformative change on complex and difficult human rights concerns. The discussion will be grounded in the long-term effort to end capital punishment in the United States and it will draw on lessons learned from other human rights campaigns.

This seminar will 1) introduce students to multidisciplinary campaigns for human rights and 2) explore how litigation and policy advocacy can be combined and leveraged to create opportunities to advance human rights.  Students will explore the range of strategies and tactics available and learn when and how to deploy them.  

At the end of the seminar, each student or team of students will have led fellow students through a logic model exercise, prepared a high level multidisciplinary strategy memorandum and led a mock coalition meeting to achieve alignment and engagement on their plan.

There is no textbook for the seminar.  Readings will include legal, academic, and general articles and materials on the subjects being covered.

Learning Objectives: The primary objective of this course is for students to understand the range of disciplines and tools available to them to implement a successful campaign and to identify synergies that can be achieved between litigation; policy advocacy, strategic communications and organizing. Students completing the course will understand which strategies to use when and how to navigate the potential conflicts between them.

We live in an age of Human Rights. Human Rights, as law, discourse, institutional structure, activist organizations, subject activists and local constitutional expressions, can be considered the crowning achievement of Western humanist secular liberalism that has been able to universalize its dictates. And yet, especially since the 90s, critiques of human rights have compounded from those identified with the left of liberalism. Those critiques include: the socialist, the anti-imperialist, the democratic, the multiculturalist, the feminist, the libertarian and the anarchist. The critiques have been so powerful as to create a generalized sense of skepticism in the discourse of human rights within these quarters especially among an emergent generation of activists, scholars, and public intellectuals. Those critiques have been met by a counter critique by a new generation of human rights believers/activists. The bulk of the critique of the critique points to either an empirical evidence of the effectiveness of human rights discourse or to the internal incoherence of the critical claims.

This course will examine the Inter-American Human Rights System, its impact on the protection of the individual, the strengthening of democratic institutions and the rule of law in the Americas. The course will be divided in two parts. The first part of the course will examine the practice and procedure of the two main institutions of the Inter-American Human Rights System: The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACtHR); including a practical training that will enable students to engage in a lively interaction with the IACHR. The second part will examine the main developments of this regional system’s jurisprudence. Specifically, in this part of the course there will be a discussion of the approaches of the Inter-American System with respect to impunity and transitional justice, freedom of expression, the rights of women, indigenous peoples’ rights and the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex persons. In this section of the course, we will also analyze U.S. engagement with the Inter-American System.

Learning Objectives:

Through this course, students will acquire a strong substantive and practical understanding of the functioning, challenges and opportunities of the Inter-American Human Rights System and how it can be used to protect human rights in the Americas.

“Human rights” names both a body of law and a moral ideal. The French revolutionaries issued a “Declaration of the Rights of Man” and the U.S. Declaration of Independence proclaimed rights that are both self-evident and unalienable. The British jurist Jeremy Bentham replied that the idea of unalienable rights is nonsense – indeed, “nonsense on stilts.” Today we confront similar philosophical debates. Millions believe that international human rights take priority over national politics and legislation. Is that true? Where do human rights come from? What are their limits? Most human rights treaties and declarations ground human rights in human dignity. But what is human dignity, and how does it ground rights? Which matters more, security rights or economic and cultural rights? – These are philosophical questions, and the first part of the seminar will focus on them.

Today the human rights movement faces grave political challenges. Human rights NGOs are under attack in many countries; the same with the International Criminal Court. Scholars warn of “the twilight of human rights law” and “endtimes of human rights,” and some argue that human rights treaties have made little practical difference. Others respond that the human rights movement has tangibly and measurably improved human well-being. Conservative critics warn of rights inflation and threats to state sovereignty; some on the left see the human rights movement as a minimalist substitute for global justice that fits too comfortably with neoliberalism.

This seminar will sample some of this writing and explore major philosophical and political issues about human rights today.

Slavery has been a phenomenon that has existed since before written history, yet it is only in the last 200 years that efforts to abolish it have gained traction. Today, increasing mobility, global supply chains, and continued social discrimination have created the environment for ongoing human exploitation, even though the formal practice of chattel slavery, or the legal ownership of one human being by another, is illegal virtually everywhere. Indeed, some estimate that there are more slaves today than at any other time in human history. Most recently, efforts to eliminate severe forms of human exploitation are being made under the banner of ending human trafficking (or more formally, trafficking in persons).

This course will provide students an overview of the multiple legal perspectives on combating human trafficking and modern slavery. This will include the definitional tensions between different perspectives, alternative approaches to addressing severe human exploitation, and an overview of the current U.S. legal framework for eradicating human trafficking and modern slavery and its weaknesses. Attention will be paid to commonly recognized principles in human rights, criminal and labor law, but also in such areas as corporate responsibility and immigration law. The class will use a range of materials, including international treaties, decisions of international and foreign tribunals, and more familiar U.S. statutory materials and legislative history (such as committee reports).

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of the class, students should be able to

• recognize many of the forms of and pervasive nature of human trafficking and modern slavery;
• identify risks of human trafficking and modern slavery in most areas of practice they may choose in the future; and
• have familiarity with emerging issues in the area of human trafficking and modern slavery.

Human Trafficking is a transnational crime and an international human rights violation. Different forms of human trafficking and the definition contained in article 3 of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons will be discussed. The course will focus on the international and transnational legal framework. It provides an analysis of Human Trafficking in International Human Rights Law (e.g. the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child), Transnational Criminal Law (e.g. the Organized Crime Convention and the Trafficking Protocol) and International Criminal Law (e.g. trafficking in persons as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute of the ICC). In particular, the course covers state responsibility for Human Trafficking and obligations to remedy.

This course will examine the U.S. immigration system through legal and policy perspectives. We will explore the source, scope and constitutional limits of congressional power to regulate immigration; the executive branch implementation of immigration legislation, particularly procedures for entry and removal, and the extent of, as well as constitutional constraints on, Presidential power; and the administrative and judicial review of executive branch action. Close attention will be paid to how membership laws and policies are established and implemented: What laws and policies govern U.S. citizenship? Who is eligible to become a legal immigrant? How are annual admissions numbers set? How and why are family and employment priorities created? How does the U.S. protect refugees? With respect to the arrival of unaccompanied children from abroad, we will consider the laws and policies that govern how the U.S. government treats them. Unauthorized migration will also be examined to understand why some migrants do not use the legal route into the U.S. and what laws and policies the U.S. has in place to deter such unlawful movements at the border and control unlawful presence in the interior. We will analyze the impact of the major 1996 immigration control legislation and its implementation, with particular attention to detention and removal. We will closely examine the role of the Justice Department’s Immigration Courts, with special attention to access to justice issues. We will explore the extraordinary need for, and challenges of, immigration law reform, as well as the particular situation of the Dreamers, children without lawful immigration status brought to and raised in the United States by their parents. Finally, we will assess the various changes implemented by the Trump and Biden Administrations, particularly in connection with the treatment of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, the resettlement of refugees from abroad, and the removal of unauthorized immigrants.

This class will cover the constitutional and political framework for the U.S. Immigration System, enforcement and adjudication agencies, immigrants, nonimmigrants, removals and deportations, detention and bond, immigration hearings, judicial review, grounds for removal and inadmissibility, “crimmigration,” immigration reform, “Chevron” deference, refugee and asylum status and other international protections. It will also include reading and analyzing major immigration cases like INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421 (1987) (well-founded fear) and Matter of Kasinga, 21 I&N Dec. 357 (BIA 1996) (female genital mutilation).

The attempted extradition of Gen. Pinochet from the U.K. to Spain to account for torture and disappearances in Chile, a tragic car accident in Washington, D.C. in which a sixteen year old is killed by a Georgian diplomat, the alleged expropriation of your corporate client’s investment interests by a foreign government, a civil lawsuit against President Mugabe of Zimbabwe during a visit to the U.S., a criminal case in Chicago against a foreign consular officer for aiding and abetting a fugitive -- such cases bring into sharp relief the operation of international immunities. This two-credit course aims to introduce students to the range of jurisdictional immunities recognized by international law and how they are implemented in domestic law. We will cover diplomatic and consular immunity, foreign sovereign (or foreign state) immunity, the immunities accorded to heads of state and government, and the special status of international organizations and their staff and member representatives, including the United Nations, its specialized agencies and individuals on special missions. Increasingly, practicing lawyers (especially those who represent governments and international organizations or who practice in places where embassies, consulates, missions and international institutions are located) need to be familiar with the reach of these rules and doctrines, and the exceptions thereto. Our focus will be on the practical application of the various international conventions, domestic statutes, and judicially crafted rules which define the law of international immunities.

This course will examine US treaties, court cases, and Congressional acts to explore what it means for the Right to Health to exist, the ways that right is recognized among indigenous peoples, and major shortfalls in achieving equity through these paths. American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIAN) experience serious health disparities in key morbidity/mortality indicators. AIANs are also a bell-weather subgroup in the US for unusual disease such as bubonic plague or the rapid dissemination of novel infectious disease such as happened among tribes in the covid-19 pandemic. In addition to risk and vulnerability that contribute to health disparities, sovereign nation status of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the US and the Indian Health Service that serves them are particular structures shown to mitigate despair and promote future well-being in remarkably difficult circumstances. There are unique laws, operations, and tensions that undergird these structures. Recent actions to strengthen treaty obligations and extend equity movements to indigenous peoples are gathering energy to address health and justice disparities.

This course focuses on the laws and systems foundational to access to care and health services for Indigenous peoples in the US. The course will include discussions on self-determination, sovereignty, funding, social determinants of health, inter-generational trauma and additional elements of Indigenous health law in the US and compare these to other Indigenous health systems particularly those in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The course is designed to provide practical skills for students interested in health equity and justice,  Indigenous access to care, Indigenous health law, and policy implementation. The course illuminates, in particular, outcomes of shared American history and distinctive obligations, systems, and opportunities to address ethnic disparities.

This seminar will examine the role of law and policy in addressing modifiable risk factors that contribute to the rising prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Risk factors to be addressed include: tobacco use, unhealthy diets, and the harmful use of alcohol. Materials and discussions will probe questions such as: What are the best regulatory practices to deal with NCDs risk factors? How do transnational corporations contribute to the spread of non-communicable diseases? How different international legal regimes come into play in addressing risk factors? What are the opportunities and challenges of using law & policy to address NCDs’ commercial risk factors? Throughout this course we will have opportunities to consider how law and policy shape contemporary legal discussions related to NCDs, such as tobacco plain packaging, alcohol sponsorship, childhood obesity, commercial speech and food labelling, and targeted marketing strategies.

The course will take a global approach grounded in constitutional law and different international legal regimes (WTO, Human Rights Systems –Regional & Universal—, among others). The course will explore how the rise in NCDs prevalence in both developed and developing countries is mainly driven by transnational corporations, globalization and foreign direct investment. Additionally, case studies will explore a variety of examples from jurisdictions spanning the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Latin American countries, including taxes to discourage consumption of unhealthy products, laws restricting advertising and promotion, and laws and policies to promote access to information to consumers.

Students will be equipped with an understanding of specific issues, such as the role of law compared with policy, the strengths and weaknesses of different regulatory strategies and the role and responsibilities of the relevant industries in promoting the right to health. After exploring a series of foundational themes and issues through the first half of the course, the remainder will focus on in-depth case studies and experiences in regulating the risk factors from a comparative perspective and future challenges.

This seminar requires attendance and participation in seminar discussions, preparation for class, writing response posts, and the submission of a final paper.

Course goals:

• Understanding of the various risk factors contributing to non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
• Understanding of various models of regulation of NCDs risk factors.
• Understanding of complex risk factors regulatory issues across various constitutional systems and international legal regimes.
• Understanding the interaction between regulation of NCDs risk factors and issues like gender and freedom of speech.
• Understanding the role of transnational corporations in the increased prevalence of NCDs.

In many parts of the world, women are discriminated against, abused, treated as property, and even murdered because they are women. But today, there is a substantial body of international and regional human rights law that can be used to change the national laws that permit these practices or fail to protect women against them. In addition, many countries have begun to give women equal rights in many fields. Thus, there is now a body of human rights and comparative law that advocates can use to advance equal human rights for women.

This course provides students with an overview of that law. It introduces them to the many forms of discrimination and violence women still face and teaches them about the major human rights treaties that can help women achieve equality with men. These include the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and the regional human rights treaties from Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Students study the work of the human rights bodies that measure state compliance with these treaties, including their guidelines and case law on issues affecting women. The course also examines comparative law on human rights issues such as sex-based discrimination in employment, inheritance, and family law rights, domestic violence and female genital mutilation, polygamy and its impact on women and children, and women’s lack of reproductive rights.

National court decisions from countries in both common law and civil law jurisdictions show how courts are using international and regional human rights law to help resolve domestic law issues. As some issues pose difficult conflicts between women’s right to equality with opposing assertions of religious and cultural rights to discriminate, the course also examines how human rights bodies resolve those conflicts and asks how they should be resolved.

Traditionally, the law of human rights has received scant regard in the study and practice of international arbitration. Nor have students, scholars, or practitioners of human rights law seen international arbitration as much more than a form of private dispute settlement that is anathema to the principle of an open system of public justice underpinning the rule of law. That position has only been entrenched by the phenomenon of specialization and fragmentation in the study and practice of international law and dispute settlement.

This course offers a different perspective and approach to the subject, at a time when the relationship between the law of human rights and international arbitration is being fundamentally recast, and when international arbitration and human rights are both subject to a populist challenge. The course will address both the substantive and procedural legal issues arising today at the interplay of human rights and international arbitration from the perspective of both legal scholarship and practice. Students will be taken to the key treaties, as well as to decisions of arbitral tribunals, domestic courts, and regional human rights courts. The course will also explore areas of future development, including in the burgeoning areas of ESG and business and human rights.

Examines selected issues involving the application of criminal law to international activities and across national boundaries. The course covers both the procedural aspects of international cooperation in criminal matters (including extradition,  cross-border investigations, mutual legal assistance, and recognition of foreign penal judgments) as well as the developing substantive international law (e.g., war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, cybercrime, and trafficking in drugs, people and firearms). Particular attention is paid to the question of jurisdiction over criminal activities at the international level, in the context of activities such as money laundering, organized crime, and computer crime, including the reach of Constitutional protections to investigations and law enforcement activities overseas. Addresses the structure, jurisdiction, and jurisprudence of the ad hoc criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the statute and rules of evidence and procedure of the International Criminal Court.

This course studies two bodies of law, both concerned with “criminal law across borders.” One is domestic (national) criminal law applied to crimes committed outside national territory. The other is crimes under international law: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and aggression. These are the “core crimes” tried by courts like the Nuremberg Tribunal, the tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ICC’s indictment of President Putin, and many states’ proposal to establish an international tribunal for aggression make international criminal law exceptionally salient today.

Along with the substantive law on these issues, we examine the foundational topics of jurisdiction, extradition, and immunity from prosecution. The course will also examine the problems confronting international criminal justice today, including the political backlash against holding leaders accountable for core crimes. The aim of the course is to introduce students to basic doctrines of international criminal law, as well as doctrines concerning the extraterritorial application of U.S. criminal law. It also provides an overview of the work of international criminal tribunals and the challenges they face. The course combines law, policy, and history.

The textbook for the course is International and Transnational Criminal Law, 4^th edition, by David Luban, Julie O’Sullivan, David P. Stewart, and Neha Jain.

The course provides an overview of the international and domestic legal and policy framework applicable to the delivery of foreign assistance and global health for the following: bilateral development partners, international/multilateral institutions, and recipient countries; non-governmental and civil society organizations; and private sector actors.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify and interpret the key relevant documents that define whether and how to provide different types of foreign assistance (including foreign assistance statutes and regulations, annual appropriations, bilateral treaties, and international treaties).
• Predict and explain policy decisions based on knowledge of areas of government discretion and restrictions.
• Identify and outline potential options to implement foreign assistance, global health and other projects based on knowledge of cross-cutting, generally applicable rules.
• Identify what you would need to know and the resources an organization will need in order to implement a project in response to a newly identified humanitarian aid or global health crisis or foreign assistance challenge.
• Differentiate between ideals and goals that are achievable under the relevant legal and regulatory framework from activities that are restricted or prohibited.
• Express the values or rationales that most influence or shape your interest in this field and how they inform your ability to assess the likelihood of success of an assistance activity.

The course focuses on international law applicable to the leading environmental and natural resource issues.  It provides a framework for identifying and addressing the legal issues, links international law with relevant national laws, and focuses on ways to strengthen compliance with international obligations.  The course covers climate change, ozone depletion, transboundary pollution and hazardous waste disposal, fresh water (both surface and ground water), marine resources, biodiversity, the links between human rights and environment and between environment and trade, and the financing of sustainable development.  Special attention is given to cutting edge issues, such as synthetic biology and ecocide as an international crime.

Learning goals for this course: To enable students to become effective counsel, litigators, negotiators, arbitrators, judges, or legal advisors on a broad range of international environmental problems; to understand international instrucments and negotiations; and to be able to apply legal concepts developed in the course within different national settings for implementing international law. 

This course examines the law, institutions, and advocacy strategies designed to protect international human rights.  We will analyze civil and political rights and economic and social rights, as well as international humanitarian law, and explore key enforcement mechanisms at the national, regional, and international levels. The evolving role of NGOs and civil society actors in advancing human rights, and the responsibility of corporations, will also be examined. Both progress and enduring challenges in making human rights real “on the ground” will be a focus of this course, together with the need for effective enactment of legal standards, enforcement of those standards, and empowerment of affected communities. Current legal issues and strategies concerning climate change and human rights will also be highlighted.  

This course provides an intensive survey of international human rights law and practice, with a principal focus on interpretation and implementation of human rights obligations, commitments, and norms in the practice of states. The course has three main components: in the first unit, we examine the development of the substantive law of human rights and its sources (including treaties, customary international law, and non-binding international instruments). In the second unit, we examine implementation of international human rights in the international, regional, and domestic systems, focusing on UN organs such as the Human Rights Council and treaty bodies as well as regional systems such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights.  Finally, in the third unit we look at the application of the substantive law and implementation mechanisms in the context of current issues in international human rights, including in the context of atrocities, and the refugee crisis. The course highlights selected contemporary ethical problems in international human rights law such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and torture; application of human rights obligations, commitments, and norms to non-state actors (including corporations); positive duties on states to protect individuals from abuses by non-state actors; universality of human rights and cultural relativism; and the need to protect human rights while countering terorism, including issues relevant to U.S. law and practice. Along the way we examine issues related to international immunities, impunity, human rights litigation under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act and Torture Victim Protection Act, and international criminal tribunals. 

This course provides an intensive survey of modern international human rights law. Tracing the historical evolution of human rights norms, we will first explore how they became a dominant feature of the post-World War II, post-colonial, and post-Cold War international orders. We will cover the doctrinal and institutional mechanisms of the modern human rights system, including the core treaties and international and regional bodies, with a particular focus on how courts, both international and domestic, can give human rights the force of law--or deprive them of it. We will examine how international human rights law defines specific rights (e.g., the right to life, the prohibition of torture), struggles to overcome structural and historical biases (e.g., discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, or race), and adapts to different contexts (e.g., climate change, armed conflict, social media and surveillance). Throughout the course, we will study why states and businesses respect human rights, why they don't, and how lawyers, NGOs, and other actors can work to ensure that most human rights norms are honored most of the time. Our readings will draw from case law, treaties, academic works, legal briefs, and other sources that offer a real-world sense of how 21st Century human rights law is articulated, litigated, and adjudicated.
Learning Objectives:

• be able to identify and apply IHRL treaties, norms, and jurisprudence to historical and contemporary legal and policy issues, including genocide, climate change, torture, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, LGBTI rights, corporate accountability, and online privacy and expression;
• be able to identify the key human rights mechanisms at the international and regional levels;
• be able to strategize how human rights disputes can be brought before these mechanisms or domestic courts.

This course will examine the philosophical and historical underpinnings of international human rights law. Students will encounter early conceptions human rights protection, alternative visions for the modern human rights framework, the development of international human rights law, and critical perspectives on the evolution and implementation of human rights.

Students will be encouraged to critically examine the successes and failures of the normative framework for the protection of human rights, whether we have achieved the universal realization of human rights, and ways in which the system might be reimagined or strengthened. Particular attention will be paid to the legal framework applicable to the protection of the rights of non-citizens, including migrants, refugees, and stateless persons. Contemporary case studies will be used to illustrate the challenges in resolving protracted situations of statelessness or displacement, and how gaps in international legal protection may exacerbate looming human rights crises, including those related to global climate change.

There are no required prerequisites for this course. However, students may find it beneficial to have taken International Law I: Introduction to International Law and/or the introductory course to International Human Rights.

Learning Objectives:

• Students will gain an understanding of some of the historical movements in the creation of human rights and political forces driving outcomes.
• Students will learn how to assess the strengths of the international human rights regime and identify key areas and methods of critique.
• Students will gain the ability to think critically about our assumptions about the structure of international law and human rights in order to imagine ways in which international human rights can be strengthened towards the universal realization of rights.
• Students will strengthen their written and verbal communication skills through written reflections, papers, and classroom discussion.
• Students completing a paper for the writing requirement will gain mastery over their chosen topic related to international human rights law, enhance the clarity and precision of their writing, and sharpen their skills in conveying their understanding through an oral presentation.

This project practicum will provide an opportunity for students to be involved in two projects designed to further accountability for war crimes and other atrocities.

Most of the work will be on the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group (ACA), which is a project established by the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom to assist the Ukraine Office of Prosecutor General (OPG) in investigating and prosecuting war crimes and atrocities committed during the conflict that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

A second project is the Innovation Council for International Justice (ICIJ), which is an initiative that will bring together experts from a wide variety of fields to analyze efforts to achieve accountability for war crimes and atrocities in order to draw lessons for innovative future approaches to this challenge. 

In the project portion of the course, students will be involved in activities with the ACA and the ICIJ that will give them a ground-level view of how institutions to provide accountability for atrocities operate in practice. These activities will enable them to acquire skills that go well beyond the typical law school experience, and may include:

(1) coordinating, developing agendas for, attending, and summarizing meetings involving ACA subject matter experts;

(2) helping organize visits to the US by Ukrainian prosecutors, investigators, and officials, as well as ACA events;

(3) working on initiatives requested by the OPG such as a victim and witness support protection and support program;

(4) supporting the collection of information on the Ukrainian population’s experience of the war and their conceptions of what would constitute accountability for harm; and

(5) conducting occasional research for the OPG.

The seminar portion of the course will:

(1) provide students with a solid understanding of how substantive international law attempts to ensure accountability for war crimes and other atrocities;

(2) give them an appreciation of the jurisdictional issues that arise in international criminal law and their implications for seeking justice;

(3) illuminate political and social challenges in creating mechanisms to seek justice for war crimes and atrocities;

(4) prompt consideration of the conceptual and jurisprudential issues involved in ascribing criminal liability to individuals who may have engaged in significantly different activities, through discussion of concepts such as command responsibility and joint criminal enterprise;

(5) invite reflection on ethical questions that arise in seeking accountability for war crimes and atrocities, such as potential tensions between obtaining an end to conflict and securing justice; the concept of a just peace; the extent to which political considerations should inform prosecutorial decisions; the appropriate role in prosecution decisions of local communities who have been harmed by atrocities; and the relative weight in prosecution decisions of considerations such as the gravity of an offense, strength of evidence, public attention, specific deterrence of allegedly culpable individuals, and general deterrence of future perpetrators.

In these ways, the practicum is designed to enable Georgetown law students to serve as leaders in the next generation of lawyers and policymakers devoted to seeking international justice.

This introductory course deals with the nature, sources and operation of "public international law," with some of the most important contemporary challenges to the international legal system, and with the international community’s evolving responses to those challenges. It includes such topics as the law governing treaties and other international agreements; the recognition of states and governments; methods for international dispute resolution including litigation in the International Court of Justice; the United Nations and other international and regional entities; international human rights and international criminal law; law of the sea and international environmental law; and the rules governing the use of force. Some attention is also given to the role of international law in the U.S. legal system; questions of jurisdiction, foreign sovereign immunity and the act of state doctrine; and the allocation of foreign affairs powers between the President, the Congress, and the Judiciary. We will discuss a few of the most pressing illustrations of the operation – or shortcomings – of the international legal system in the context of current problems or crises. As a first-year elective, this course is intended to offer a contrast or a complement to the bulk of the first year curriculum, by exposing students to the substance and style of foreign and international law materials, institutions, and dispute-resolution mechanisms, and to provide a gateway to Georgetown's rich international law upper class course offerings. 

How does international law apply in domestic legal systems? When are treaties and customary international law binding in national courts? What are the rules and mechanisms of “incorporation”? Do judges have a responsibility to follow generally accepted rules of international law? This seminar offers students an opportunity to research, write and make presentations about specific issues related to the status of international law in domestic legal systems. The primary focus will be on the U.S. system, but a comparative approach is included and students are encouraged to investigate the treatment of international law in foreign legal systems that directly incorporate customary international law as well as those where international legal rules always require legislative enactment.

These issues arise in varying contexts, including civil and commercial litigation against foreign parties, suits against foreign states or international organizations, human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute and efforts to enforce the judgments of foreign courts.  We will also consider the impact of rulings by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, questions of sovereign immunity and Acts of State, when and how international law can be used to interpret domestic statutes, and how to prove foreign law in civil and commercial cases.  More broadly, we will be exploring whether domestic courts can or should act as "enforcers" of international law, whether domestic courts should be considered part of an emergent “global judiciary,” the importance of transnational cooperation between courts, etc.

This course is open to J.D. and LL.M. students and requires a paper and an oral presentation.

Learning goals for this course:

Ability to research, use, and write about topics at the intersections of international and domestic law; awareness of how different legal systems deal with relevant topics; ability to present orally and in writing.

This seminar examines efforts to reduce poverty in countries and problems of accountability in doing so, whether in international institutions, national institutions, or the private sector. Considers various approaches to accountability. Covers issues of compliance, good governance, human rights, corruption, environmental sustainability, and experience with various accountability mechanisms in international institutions. Includes two simulations in which students must address accountability issues.

Learning goals for this course: To understand the difficulties of reducing poverty within countries and the legal issues associated with bringing accountability to doing so. Students should be able to develop insights that can be applied in both the public and private sectors.

This course will explore the global fight against impunity -- specifically, as it pertains to curbing war crimes, human rights violations, grand corruption and looted antiquities -- through class discussions, lectures and guest speakers with personal experience in fighting the impunity that is so often associated with war crimes and economic crimes. It is based on the premise that those that are willing to slaughter thousands of innocents, are also willing to steal millions of dollars and loot our collective cultural heritage – and that the fight against impunity includes both war crimes and economic crimes (and often, the international trend to focus on the former, ignores the domestic interest in prosecuting the latter). Over the semester, students in a seminar-size class will be exposed to the basics of international criminal law, international human rights law and international economic crimes, as well how the fight against impunity impacts national security and foreign policy issues. The class will focus on issues related to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, as well as the recent global efforts to fight grand corruption and recover looted assets and antiquities, including UN Convention Against Corruption and the new UN-World Bank Stolen Asset Recovery (StAR) Initiative. Students will be allowed to write a paper of their choice regarding international law and the fight against impunity. Class grades will be a combination between class participation (20%) and a seminar paper (80%). Required readings (cases, statutes, articles, book excerpts, on-line treaties, etc.) will be illuminated by lecture and discussion from a professor with first-hand experience in the global fight against impunity through his personal experience with the Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Omar al-Bashir matters, as well his background with the UN war crimes tribunal, the White House, the Pentagon, and the World Bank’s StAR Initiative, and helping recover stolen assets on behalf of various governments. In order to take advantage of Georgetown’s unique position in the intersection of law, politics, and international affairs, the course will feature high-profile guest speakers who will highlight their own personal efforts to fight impunity and how such international efforts impact national security and foreign policy matters.

The global trade in arms is estimated to be worth at least $127 billion dollars (in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available), and has been increasing since 2015. This trade involves not only major powers such as the USA, Russia, and China but also many countries in the global North and South. It also involves a range of technologies, from light weapons and ammunition to aircraft, missiles, drone systems, weapon launchers, through intelligence, information and cyber systems. Recent human rights activism and investigative journalism have drawn public attention to the devastating human rights implications of the trade in what are deemed “conventional” arms. Civil society actors decry the fact that small arms and light weapons have caused the death of millions of individuals in civil wars in the last two decades. Yemeni and European human rights lawyers have initiated legal proceedings against European corporations for complicity with war crimes committed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen with weapons purchased in Europe. Seventeen news organizations joined hands with Amnesty International to investigate Israeli spyware Pegasus, revealing how it has provided authoritarian rulers with the means to surveil their populations and concentrate power.

Indeed, beyond the taking of life, the arms purchased legally by states around the world directly and indirectly harm a wide range of human rights protected in international law, including health, liberty, privacy, free speech and association, and religious freedom. In this course we will explore how international law regulates the global arms trade, focusing on the place of human rights considerations in this regulation. This international regulation is fractured. While weapons of mass destruction and weapons deemed particularly cruel or destructive are subject to specific bans or stringent transfer restrictions, the trade in the bulk of conventional weapons is subject to norms deriving from international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international human rights law, international trade law, non-binding multilateral regimes coordinating export controls, and binding and non-binding rules on business and human rights. After an introduction to the history, trends and political science of the global arms trade, we will discuss the above legal norms and their enforcement mechanisms. In addition to legal sources such as treaties and case-law, we will read scholarship in international law and international relations critically assessing the law from a human rights perspective. The course’s overarching aim is to understand whether international law limits the global arms trade’s harms to human rights, or to the contrary facilitates them. In the process, by examining how various subfields of international law address the arms trade, we will explore the relative strengths and weaknesses of these subfields to protect human rights, of formally binding rules and soft law, and of regulation targeting states, individuals and corporations.   

Learning Objectives:

The main learning objective is for students to understand the various international norms regulating the arms trade, including the emerging body of scholarly literature in international law and international relations discussing those norms. Until recently, the international regulation of the conventional arms trade was severely under-studied and under-researched. The course will introduce students to the principal scholars in the field, enabling them to continue researching these issues should they wish to do so in the future. This course will also introduce students to the global arms trade, its main economic and geo-political characteristics, and its human rights implications. They will also learn about the main sources of reliable information about this trade.

More broadly, through discussions in class drawing on legal and international relations literature, the course aims to help students develop critical perspectives on international law, in particular on questions of norm fragmentation, norm enforcement, North-South relations, and the relations between humanitarian and economic considerations. By focusing on a narrow question (the human rights implications of the arms trade) and examining how it is addressed in various subfields of international law, the students will also develop a comparative perspective on these subfields, and hopefully reach new understandings on some of the characteristics, and strengths and weaknesses of each.

The course provides an introduction to the human right to health and its implementation in a few hot topic issues. Issues covered will include criminalization of drug use and sexual and reproductive health, vulnerable groups, HIV/AIDS, the intellectual property regime and access to medicines, and a critique of the current framework and the challenges that impede the realization of the human right.

This course provides an overview of major principles, theories, operational concerns, and public policy issues related to complex humanitarian emergencies. The course highlights selected contemporary crises, examining causes and consequences of these emergencies. Examples include Ukraine, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, Myanmar and others. A particular focus is the role of humanitarian issues in foreign policy and international relations.

This seminar examines both progress and ongoing challenges in seeking meaningful justice and accountability for serious international crimes, including crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. We’ll begin with an overview of the challenges of effective atrocity prevention and an examination of fundamental developments over the last few decades establishing international and hybrid criminal tribunals and other mechanisms of transitional justice, including truth and reconciliation commissions. Building on this foundation, and drawing upon legal scholarship, social science research, and country case studies, we will then explore a range of responses to key justice challenges recurring in a number of countries emerging from conflict. These challenges include: (1) the often complicated relationship between peace processes and justice initiatives; (2) the question of whose justice goals are being pursued and how national, regional, and international stakeholders interact in such efforts; and (3) the complexities of building enduring justice on the ground through meaningful domestic rule of law reform, outreach, cultural engagement, and other means. Students will write a substantial seminar paper within the subject matter scope of the seminar.

Three decades after the end of the Cold War, authoritarianism remains a major political force across the world.  This seminar considers the relationship between authoritarianism and law.  It mixes theoretical works with historical and contemporary case studies, drawing on insights from social science, political philosophy, and law.  The course will address: the roles of constitutions, courts, lawyers, and legal activists in authoritarian societies; the growing use of digital technologies by autocratic governments; authoritarianism’s challenges to American and international law; and the relationship between law and democratic erosion.  This course is intended to be inviting to all students, and does not assume any specific knowledge of foreign legal systems.   

This three-credit survey course is designed to introduce students to the different dimensions of law and development, integrating legal, historical, academic, and practical models and approaches.  The course will cover a range of issues and substantive areas of law, including economic and social development and rule of law approaches; human rights law; comparative law; peace and security; international economic law (including trade, finance, aid, and investment);  labor, environmental, and health law; market regulation; institutional models for advancing law and development; gender; and sustainable development.  It will also examine the increasing role of technology and data in law and development and the connection between law and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  Throughout the semester, the course will explore how different areas of law address questions of equity, inclusiveness, vulnerability, and environmental sustainability.  There are no prerequisites for this course, and it is intended to be both an introduction to law and development and a complement to other course offerings at Georgetown Law.  

The course is divided into three parts.  The first part begins with an exploration of the foundations of law and development, including an examination of the issues, debates, and academic literature.  This portion of the course will examine the role of governments and institutions in law and development (including the World Bank, WTO, IMF, UN system, donor organizations, regional organizations, and others), as well as how rules are designed and implemented from the perspective of individual and community stakeholders.  Part I of the course will also highlight the evolution of different approaches, theories, and models within law and development, including economic approaches (structural change approaches, dependency theory, neoclassical/neoliberal approaches, endogenous growth theory, post-Washington consensus models, and others), promotion and criticism of rule of law approaches (legal pluralism, institutionalism and new institutional economics, constitutionalism, international vs. national law approaches, legal empowerment, informality, and others), and current movements such as law and political economy and TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law).   

The second part of the course will introduce students to the different substantive dimensions of law and development.  This segment will allow students to both understand the legal foundations of different aspects of law and development and explore intersections between different areas of law as they relate to development, highlighting the cross-cutting nature of law and development.  Topics will include human rights law, international economic law (finance, investment, and trade), conflict and resource control, gender and development, corruption and development, development assistance, and law and development aspects of health, environment, and climate change. 

The third part of the course will focus on issue-based and regional case studies, allowing students to apply what was covered in the first two parts of the course in different contexts and explore ways in which law has been – or could be – a driver for development.  Issue-focused case studies will include land tenure and contracts, labor, agriculture and food security, intellectual property rights, and data and development.  Regional case studies will include Africa, Asia (with some focus on China and India, among other countries), and Latin America.  In this part of the course, students will also assess which law and development approaches have been best suited to different circumstances, economies, cultures, and communities. 

Learning Objectives

The course has several interconnected learning objectives:

• Understand the legal, historical, economic, and political context of different aspects of law and development, individually and in relation to each other;
• Examine different normative approaches to law and development, globally and regionally;
• Interpret academic research, relevant excerpts from international treaties, provisions in bilateral and regional agreements, and laws and regulations, building an understanding of the inter-connected nature of different legal instruments;
• Assess law and development challenges facing governments and international institutions, identifying possible approaches and trade-offs;
• Understand how economic, social, and sustainable development can be further incorporated into soft and hard law, as well as international, regional, and national law;
• Introduce students to different roles for lawyers in the field of law and development; and
• Equip students with the knowledge and tools to approach law as a tool for promoting social, economic, and sustainable development. 

Surveys the law of armed conflict (LOAC) and customary international law as applied by the United States in warfare. From where does LOAC arise? What is a war crime – and who decides? What is “unnecessary suffering,” and what drives that legal determination? When does LOAC apply and what role do other rules of law, such as domestic U.S. law and International Human Rights Law play in regulating the conduct of armed conflict? Does it cover non-state actors? What are U.S. LOAC obligations, and how are they enforced? How does one distinguish illegal combatants from prisoners of war? Where do military commissions come from, and who may be tried by them? Could the atomic bombing of Nagasaki have been a war crime? Can a superior’s order constitute a defense to war crime charges? What is the U.S. position in regard to laser weapons? Land mines? Non-lethal weapons? Torture? Rendition? Reprisals? The assassination of enemy commanders? What is an illegal order, and what should a soldier do if she receives one? How may battlefield war crimes be prosecuted? Our inquiry will focus on the law applicable to the conduct of U.S. military operations in past and current conflicts, whether or not they be declared, whether they be internal or international. Although primarily focused on the law of land warfare, the law of air and naval warfare, as well as space and information warfare, will be considered.

Learning objectives:

To gain a firm understanding of the law of armed conflict and to consider, through discussion of practical exercise from the textbook, how the law is applied in an operational context.

This seminar, for graduate fellows in the Leadership and Advocacy for Women in Africa (LAWA) Program, provides students with the opportunity to enhance their legal research and writing skills in connection with a major research paper to be finalized in the spring semester. Each student focuses on a specific women's human rights issue within that student's country of origin, analyzes the domestic legal framework in light of international human rights standards, and proposes recommendations for both legal and other types of remedies using international and regional human rights mechanisms. The students begin with a topic, and from there develop a topic statement, a thesis, a thesis statement, a skeletal and detailed outline, and an introduction to their paper. Students undertake intensive research into their theses, and also develop a bibliography. This class lays the groundwork for students to write a major legal research paper during the spring semester.

Students will produce a substantive paper comprising not less than 40 pages, addressing a current violation of African women’s human rights, and including innovative and practical solutions targeted to the various branches of government, civil society, and individual women. Students will develop their theses in consideration of the social, religious, cultural and economic conditions of the country or countries addressed. The first half of the course will examine comparative women’s human rights on the specific topics selected by the students during LAWA Seminar I. The second half of the course will be dedicated to the oral presentation of research papers and discussion of these paper topics, including preparation for presentations before USAID and other interested audiences. This course is open only to Fellows in the Leadership and Advocacy for Women in Africa Program.

Course Description

Despite progress in legal protections for LGBTQ+ and non-binary people, and in the face of recent setbacks, LGBTQ+ communities continue to face systemic obstacles to quality health care such as coverage, refusals of care, substandard care, lack of access to culturally competent care, discrimination, and inequitable policies and practices in health care settings. These experiences correlate with significant health disparities, including greater exposure to sexual, institutional, and state violence, higher rates of tobacco and other substance use, mental health concerns, HIV and other infectious diseases, and cancer. These disparities are even more pronounced for LGBTQ+ people who are also members of other groups that face discrimination because of race, ethnicity, or other aspects of identity—such as Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, young and older people, people with disabilities, people with low incomes, and immigrants, among others.

In this seminar, students will learn about LGBTQ+ health law and policy issues from a variety of perspectives—including medicine, public health, public benefits, health insurance, social determinants of health, and U.S. foreign policy—and gain a better understanding of the legal and social mistreatment of LGBTQ people at both the individual and community level and its impact on health. Topics covered will include health care access, LGBTQ-inclusive data collection, clinical and cultural competency, disability rights, reproductive justice, and health issues facing LGBTQ+ youth and older adults. This course will also examine how LGBTQ+ individuals and families are treated under federal, state, and international law, and how these policies impact access to health care and contribute to health disparities.

Course Goals & Student Learning Outcomes

The primary objective of the course is to teach students about health disparities faced by LGBTQ+ communities, to identify the laws and policies that contribute to these health disparities, identify legal and policy measures to reduce those disparities, and to discuss emerging issues and topics that affect LGBTQ+ peoples’ health. Through this course, students will learn about the impact that federal, state, and international laws and policies have on LGBTQ+ health, including speakers who are actively working in the LGBTQ+ community at nonprofits, Capitol Hill, and government agencies. Past speakers include attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Lambda Legal, National Center for Transgender Equality, the National Immigration Law Center, and the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

This seminar will help students develop critical thinking skills and will provide a clearer understanding of how federal, state, and international laws and policies impact LGBTQ+ health. The course will also highlight how lawyers can use the tools of law (e.g., litigation, legislation, regulatory action) to advance health justice and equity amid a rapidly changing legal and political environment.

The struggle to respect and ensure human rights while also protecting national security raises important and complex legal and policy challenges. This course will examine current issues at the intersection of human rights and national security, with a focus on the use of force.

The first half of the course will cover the legal frameworks governing the use of force, including the UN Charter and jus ad bellum, the law of armed conflict (also known as the law of war or international humanitarian law), human rights law, and the U.S. Constitution. Students will examine how the rise of transnational terrorist organizations and advancements in armed drone technology have blurred the line between wartime and peacetime legal rules and placed tremendous pressure on these legal frameworks in the decades following the 9/11 attacks. By the end of this portion of the course, students will be able to analyze uses of military force in the daily news to determine whether the use of force is lawful under domestic and international law.

The second half of the course will cover key issues at the intersection of national security and human rights including: U.S. drone strikes, indefinite detention and the use of military commissions at Guantanamo, the CIA’s torture program after 9/11, the climate crisis, and more. Where feasible, we will cover current events and have practitioners from the field join us for a discussion of the topic. In past years, we have had speakers from the State Department, Defense Department, Congress, and human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First.

Student learning objectives for the course are to use class sessions and the preparation of a paper:

• To become familiar with basic human rights standards that govern the use of force in law enforcement settings, with particular emphasis on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights;
• To become familiar with basic international law standards that govern the grounds for resort to force (jus ad bellum) and regulate the way force may be used in armed conflicts (jus in bello or law of armed conflict/international humanitarian law);
• To gain an appreciation of the complex ways in which many current security threats and responses to them have features that do not fall squarely into the categories of either crime subject to law enforcement operations or armed conflict subject to conventional military operations; and
• To become familiar with a range of complex issues at the intersection of national security and human rights and the diversity of professional opportunities in these areas.

This introductory, survey course will explore national security law as developed from the U.S. Constitution, relevant federal statutes, case law, and historical experience, as well as from principles and influences of international law and foreign relations.  It will cover key components of, and debates over, the Federal Government’s exercise of national security authorities, including: decisions to use force and how to employ it; detention and interrogation of combatants; collection, protection, and sharing of intelligence; military and civilian prosecutions for national security-related criminal charges, including terrorism, espionage, export control, and state-sponsored cybercrimes; civil litigation involving national security interests and concerns; protection of homeland security; and economic aspects of national security policy. Themes of the course will include: (1) the separation of powers among the three branches of the Federal Government, and appropriate roles for these branches in the conduct of national security activities; (2) the interplay between international law and domestic law; (3) textual, historical, and functional modes of legal argument as applied to national security issues; and (4) the evolution of modern warfare and its implications for relevant legal regimes. 

Course Goals/Student Learning Outcomes:

This course will provide students with exposure to the broad reach of modern national security law in the United States, and the many as-yet unresolved and knotty legal, policy, practical, and moral issues that arise as the Government strives to protect national security, while preserving the generally free and open society that most U.S. persons expect.  Students will examine with a critical eye the justifications offered for, and scope of, security-based governmental actions, while considering practical alternatives and results.

The student learning outcomes will be the following:

1. Analyze current and emerging issues in national security law, and understand the policy arguments underlying the balance of ensuring security and protecting individual rights
2. Assess the justifications offered for, and scope of, security-based governmental actions
3. Examine the effects that national security measures have on individual rights of U.S. citizens and non-citizens, and on U.S. institutions, norms, and governance.

This seminar is about the phenomena of national and cultural identity formation within states and non-state groups (ethnic, racial, regional, religious, cultural, tribal) and the roles played by law and culture in defining and distributing membership in a collective or “national” community. The course material will provide a foundation in political theories of nationalism and will focus on two different forms of contemporary nationalism: the rise of a new American and predominantly white nationalism (since the 2016 election) and a non-US example of a sovereignty or self-determination movement (such as the Catalan independence movement in Spain). Along the way we will discuss additional and alternative forms of belonging and exclusion, such as monuments and memory, statelessness and diaspora, and postcolonial and cosmopolitan forms of citizenship. This interdisciplinary and comparative seminar is geared toward better understanding how law and culture are used to divide and unify diverse populations, and exploring how democratic, heterogeneous states and communities might find common purpose.

In a project-based practicum course, students participate in a weekly seminar and work on a project under the supervision of their professors. This course explores the challenges and opportunities of using law to address risk factors that contribute to the rising prevalence of NCDs, such as unhealthy diets, tobacco use, and alcohol consumption. By taking an international and comparative approach, it navigates the theory behind the regulation of risk factors to NCDs in relation to concrete examples from around the world, with a particular emphasis on Latin America, where considerable progress has happened in recent years. Students will participate in a two-hour/week seminar and carry out 10 hours/week of project work under the direction of the course professors.

SEMINAR: In every class, students will learn substantive content and develop lawyering skills, leading to a comprehensive understanding of the role of law in relation to risk factors to NCDs, including in policy, advocacy, and litigation. Specifically, students will be introduced to NCDs (definition, risk factors, and global burden); understand the role of corporations as drivers of NCDs; learn about regulations to address NCDs, such as pricing and taxation, labelling and packaging, and restrictions to marketing and advertising; and explore the strengths and weaknesses of regulatory, advocacy, and litigation approaches to NCDs. In navigating these topics, students will develop a set of lawyering skills, including generating and using evidence, monitoring policy, building coalitions, conducting scenario-planning, engaging decision-makers, segmenting audiences, and framing arguments.

PROJECT WORK: On the experiential/field-work side, students will work with external partners of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law (and the newly created Global Center for Legal Innovation Food Environments) on legal and policy projects related to NCDs and the law. For example, students may draft alternative reports to UN bodies analyzing compliance with human rights obligations related to unhealthy diets, tobacco use, or alcohol consumption (e.g., “shadow reports”). Such a report could analyze the prevailing legal frameworks in a particular country and highlight strengths and weaknesses in the statutory and regulatory language. By working with the O’Neill Institute and civil society organizations, the course gives students the opportunity to use law to address critical health challenges.

The course will discuss the legal and constitutional issues that arose with the establishment of the modern state of Israel over land inhabited by Palestinians.  The course includes historical accounts of the unfolding conflict, debate over the one state solution, the nature of the Israel lobby and the BDS movement. 

This course examines domestic refugee law and policy, with particular focus on asylum and other refugee-related claims for protection that arise in the U.S. legal system. Students will become familiar with the key actors in the asylum and refugee law arena, including the U.S. Congress, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the federal courts, and international entities.

The course objectives are: (1) to equip students with an understanding of the principles of refugee policy, asylum law, and the United States' procedures for refugee protection, and (2) to provide students with a practical appreciation for how refugee policy is formed and a working knowledge of asylum law, which will serve as a foundation for academic research, clinical study, employment, pro bono work, and/or internship opportunities within the U.S. government and the NGO community.

In addition to focusing on the refugee definition as interpreted by U.S. courts, we will examine the processes for adjudicating asylum claims -- where the system works and where it fails. We will also seek to understand the limits of asylum law and explore the toughest issues facing asylum adjudicators and policy makers today.

This course explores how different societies regulate human mobility. Using a comparative, law and society approach, we will denaturalize and probe the basic norms and values of our own immigration system by examining alternatives. As we will see, these systems answer three essential questions: (1) who gets to join a society (“admissions”); (2) what rights and obligations these new entrants to society have (“membership”); and (3) how much coercion these systems use to enforce (1) and (2) (what we will call “closure”). Some of these examples we will examine are historic and some are contemporary; some are more restrictive than our system and some are more open. 

In every case, we will see that these real-world systems contain implicit answers to questions at the heart of political theory and political ethics. What qualities should we value in new members of our society? What are the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and what forms of belonging outside citizenship – if any – should societies grant? How much coercion is it OK to use in migration control, and to what ends? 

In the last third of the course, students will use the normative intuitions they have developed through contact with the case studies to grapple directly with classic and contemporary theoretical work asking these same questions. Students who opt into the three-credit version of the class will develop their own research projects that address the relationship between (im)migration law and public values.

Learning Objectives:

Substantive learning objectives:

• To contextualize familiar bodies of domestic and international law within a broader set of institutions and bodies of law that regulate human mobility; 

• To understand some of the different designs that are possible for these systems; 

• To begin to develop an understanding of the trade-offs, values, and assumptions embedded in these institutional designs, and to understand how these institutional designs affect people and communities (migrants and others) (ILO); and 

• To see connections between migration, migration law, and phenomena including national identity, politics, political economy, labor, race, gender, and the state (ILO)

Skills:

• Public speaking and oral presentation

• Critical thinking

• Consideration of ethical dimensions of public policy

• Developing and writing a scholarly research paper (WR)

Access to affordable and quality health care eludes millions of Americans. Through changes ushered in by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), millions of Americans have gained health insurance. At the same time, implementation of the law’s reforms have been challenging, and its provisions have been subject to extensive litigation and continued threats of repeal. Health care costs also continue to climb for privately-insured Americans more broadly – leading to calls for further action to regulate health care prices – the main driver of rising costs.

The legal and policy clashes over the ACA’s implementation have also foreshadowed future obstacles facing subsequent major health care reform initiatives - such as the No Surprises Act and Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program.

This course will examine the regulation of private health insurance and health care prices in commercial insurance and public programs. The course will explore federal regulatory changes under the ACA; subsequent reforms to private insurance under the No Surprises Act and other measures under consideration to address health care pricing; the new authority for Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs; and legal challenges burdening the regulation of private health insurance and efforts to regulate health care prices. This course will also situate health care in the broader context of measures to address public health and population health, interrogate the persistent disparities in health care access and quality and the challenges to addressing those disparities, including what became more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Guest lectures will provide students with a greater, contextualized understanding of former and current legal and policy disputes related to private health insurance regulation and measures to address rising health care prices. The course will also explore what these legal and policy efforts mean for consumers, public health, and broad work to address inequities in health care access and outcomes—as well as where Congress and the White House may push forward with health reform in the future.

This fieldwork practicum course, focusing on the interaction between international human rights law and reproductive health and rights.  The course will provide an overview of international reproductive health and rights, while affording students an opportunity to work in organizations that are addressing issues in the field in various ways.

As such, students participate in a two-hour weekly seminar and work for 10 hours/week for at least 11 weeks during the semester at an outside organization.

SEMINAR: The seminar will begin by providing an overview of international human rights law as it pertains to reproductive rights. The course will then focus on access to reproductive and sexual health from an international perspective, examining States’ obligations on a variety of issues, such as maternal mortality and coerced sterilization. Analyzing recent decisions emerging from regional and international human rights bodies, such as the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission and Court on Human Rights and the CEDAW Committee (UN Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women), the seminar component will provide a necessary foundation for the students to conduct their fieldwork.

Fieldwork: Students will be placed with organizations working in the area of reproductive rights. Most likely, the work will be conducted remotely, as several of these organizations are not based in the Washington D.C. area. The work conducted for this portion of the course will be supervised by the external organization

Some of the projects may include assisting in drafting amicus briefs for cases currently pending before international bodies, and briefs assessing a particular State's compliance with human rights law regarding sexual and reproductive rights to be filed in front of UN bodies (shadow reports). Through these projects, students will learn how to conduct an analysis of existing legal and regulatory frameworks for sexual and reproductive health from a human rights perspective. By working with external civil society organizations, the course will give students the opportunity to develop practical projects using international human rights law to advocate for the advancement of reproductive health rights. In the past, external partners have included organizations working on women's rights issues, such as: the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Women’s Link Worldwide, Human Rights Watch (Women’s Rights Division), IPAS, the Women's Equality Center, and the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, among others.

This course will explore the history and law of reproductive rights in the United States.  The majority of the semester will be spent analyzing the constitutional framework, jurisprudence and federal and state regulations governing forced sterilization, contraception and abortion from the 1920s until today.  We will consider the historical, social and religious context of the regulation of reproduction; gender, race and socioeconomic class issues; and the practical impact of the regulations in effect today. This course is primarily focused on reproductive rights in the United States, but we may consider comparative international perspectives.

Please note that this course will not cover regulation of parenting, adoption, foster care, assisted reproductive technologies or related reproductive health topics, or reproductive justice in any meaningful detail.

All students are expected to read the assignments, attend class, and prepare for active discussion every week. Depending on course enrollment, I may assign small groups of students to assist me in leading each week’s discussion of the assigned materials.  Short oral presentations on current events or topics of particular interest will likely be assigned during the second half of the semester.

Grading: Class participation, including oral presentations, and/or short reaction papers will represent at least 35% of the final grade.  A take-home exam will account for the remaining 65%.

This course provides an opportunity to explore issues related to the use of humans as research subjects. The course will begin by examining the history of human subject research, including the abuses that led to the creation of our modern legal protections. Following a discussion of the ethical principles of research involving humans, we will carefully explore the legal treatment of human subjects, focusing on US regulations and international instruments. Core sources will include: the Common Rule (45 CFR 46), Belmont Report, Declaration of Helsinki, Nuremberg Code, and CIOMS. After exploring a series of foundational themes and issues through the first half of the week, the remainder of the class will focus on in-depth case studies. Topics may include: international research, research involving vulnerable populations (children, prisoners, and pregnant women), informed consent, research on subjects with impaired decision-making abilities, genetic/genomic research, risk-benefit analysis, coercion/undue inducement, use of placebos, and IRB governance.

This course offers students an opportunity to learn the definitions of “rule of law” and how to reform legal and judicial systems, including measuring the impact of those reforms. The field of rule of law reform is an expanding area of practice, be it focused on strengthening the concept of ‘Rule of Law’ and its indicators or to achieve certain economic, social and/or political goals.

The course begins by reviewing various definitions of what is meant by “rule of law”, recognizing that different institutions, governments, public and private sectors want to promote reforms to legal/judicial systems perhaps seeking the same end, but through different ways. The course uses a case study methodology, including specific sessions with U.S. and foreign judges and other rule of law practitioners active in reform efforts. Topics include: Democracy and the rule of law; Access to justice; Criminal justice and Criminal procedural reform; Court administration and Case management; Commercial court reform; Alternative dispute resolution (ADR); Judicial independence and Accountability; National security and Transitional justice; Indicators to measure the rule of law; and a discussion of the role played by legal actors in addressing corruption, both within and outside the legal system.

We will consider the rationale behind rule of law reforms by examining experiences around the world, including in the United States. We will see how reforms may target more competitive market economies, stronger law enforcement, gender equality or social justice. We will learn the impact of an increase in demand from users of justice systems who want improved services, not only “formal” justice users in courts, but informal justice services like paralegals and chieftaincy also. The course will also address the often overlapping or inconsistent agendas of donors, international organizations (e.g., United Nations, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, IMF, USAID, U.S. Military, among others) in the discussion and analysis.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the course. Students will have acquired an understanding of the various definitions of ‘rule of law’ and the factors leading to and preventing successful reform efforts.

At the end of the course, students will have acquired some understanding of the differences and similarities among international organizations and their approaches to Rule of Law to be able distinguish varying objectives (e.g. democracy promotion, economic development, human rights and social justice, anti-corruption and law enforcement).

At the end of the course, students will have acquired a vocabulary and understanding of overlapping (and even inconsistent agendas) to be able to identify the “drivers” of reform and provide inputs for the design or evaluation of Rule of Law reform efforts.

This fieldwork practicum course focuses on issues of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics from an international and national human rights law perspective. The course will provide an overview of the main human rights issues in these fields, while affording students an opportunity to work with organizations that are addressing human rights violations of people based on sexuality, gender and sex characteristics, in various ways.

As such, students participate in a two-hour weekly seminar and work for 10 hours/week for at least 11 weeks during the semester at an outside organization.

Background: Every day, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQI) people are victims of multiple human rights violations, which are directly linked to the lack of acceptance (by society and the State) of their non-normative sexualities, gender identities or gender expressions. Some of the most common human rights violations of LGBTQI people include killings, torture, ill-treatment, “corrective” or punishing rape, "conversion therapy," discrimination in schools, in the workplace and in accessing health services, among many others. Intersex persons face human rights violations because of the general lack of acceptance of their bodies that differ from the socially accepted standards of “female” and “male” bodies. Because of their sex characteristics, intersex people often face human rights violations including irreversible non-consented and non-medically necessary genital surgery at the early stages of infancy and throughout childhood, as well as forced sterilization, among others.

SEMINAR: The course will take a close look at some of the human rights violations faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) people, or other people perceived as such, as well as the corresponding States’ obligations under international human rights law. The students will analyze landmark and recent decisions emerging from regional and international human rights monitoring bodies, which have developed standards around these categories. This analysis will provide a solid legal foundation for students to develop their projects for external partners.

FIELDWORK: Students will be placed with organizations working in the area of sexual and reproductive rights. Most likely, the work will be conducted remotely, as several of these organizations are not based in the Washington D.C. area. The work conducted for this portion of the course will be supervised by the external organization.

In the past, the work with external partners specific human rights issues faced by LGBTQI people, included collaborating on several policy and legal projects, including preparing shadow reports to present before international human rights bodies, conducting analysis of legislation or a related case, among others. External partners vary every year, and include international and domestic leading human rights organizations working on the promotion and protection of the rights of LGBTQI people at the international and domestic level.

While arbitration is most often thought of as an alternative to litigation in national courts, arbitration between sovereign states developed as an alternative to war. This course examines the use of arbitration to resolve the most complex and politically sensitive disputes between governments.

Drawing heavily on the experience of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, students will learn the reasons for the renaissance of this form of dispute settlement and how it differs from more conventional forms of arbitration and from international courts with pre-appointed judges. Students will evaluate arbitration's effectiveness in a series of recent high-profile cases. The course will include video clips of hearings and interactive exercises.

The Doctors Trial considered the fate of twenty-three German physicians who either participated in the Nazi program to euthanize persons deemed "unworthy of life" (the mentally ill, mentally retarded, or physically disabled) or who conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners without consent. The Doctors Trial lasted 140 days. Eighty-five witnesses testified and almost 1,500 documents were introduced. Sixteen of the doctors charged were found guilty. Seven were executed.

The Doctors Trial provides a significant and important example of human rights violations and serves as a lesson in law and bioethics vital to understanding how law evolved from an initial eugenics policy to and including the horrible examples that framed human atrocities during WW II. 

This course will highlight examples from Jeanne Guillemin's "Hidden Atrocites, Japanese Germ Warfare and American Obstruction of Justice at the Tokyo Trial", Joel Dimsdale's  "Anatomy of Malice" examining the psychological assessments necessary for the trials, and Vivien Spitz's "Doctors from Hell", delving deep into the actual court transcripts from the proceedings. Ben Ferenz's work, one of the actual prosecutors at the trials, will also be included as insight into this tragic period. 

This seminar examines the role of the United States in shaping international human rights law and advancing the realization of these rights both at home and abroad. The US role since World War II is significant but also complicated, marked by leadership but also ambivalence.  The US stance toward international human rights has always been deeply shaped by human rights struggles at home -- over racial injustice, gender discrimination, and economic inequality – and by US ambivalence about participating in various multilateral treaties and institutions.  Increasingly, advancing human rights at home and abroad are profoundly interconnected, especially as the United States and the world confront urgent problems of climate change, Covid 19, economic inequality and other threats to human dignity that cross borders and affect us all.

With the United States so deeply divided politically, how can US leaders best move ahead to protect human rights at home and to advance human rights abroad? Do the foundations of international human rights law – rooted in the universal affirmation of inherent human dignity and equality – provide new promise going forward, and can greater empathy and common purpose be nurtured across political divides at home and abroad? What tangible mechanisms and strategies can best address the most urgent human rights challenges today? Who will be the key actors in these efforts, and what roles can state and local governments, civil society organizations, individuals and local groups and others play, in addition to the longstanding role of the federal government? Does the US system of federalism offer promising avenues for progress on urgent human rights issues or do deep divisions within the United States today undercut the prospects for consistent US leadership abroad? This seminar will explore these questions systematically. Students will write a substantial seminar paper within the subject matter scope of the seminar.

This course examines how societies address widespread atrocities and serious crimes, e.g., crimes against humanity, genocide, human rights violations, and other abuses, through transitional justice mechanisms.  These violations often occur in conflict situations, but also can arise through repression, particularly of marginalized groups.  Broadly defined, transitional justice mechanisms are processes that provide acknowledgment, recompense and solace to victims through various accountability measures, with a long-term goal of reconciliation and/or an acknowledgement of the abuses and the adoption of measures to address the victims and steps to prevent the recurrence of the abuses/violations. The mechanisms are labeled “transitional” because they are typically implemented during or following atrocities and widespread abuses. In this regard, the crimes committed are of a scale that the judicial system, by itself, is unable to address.  The abuses require a broader and different approach. The focus in transitional justice processes is both on victims and on accountability measures that address the society as a whole. Transitional justice mechanisms can include the criminal justice system (e.g., international, national, local), as well as other non-legal approaches to justice and accountability, including truth-telling processes, reparations, reforms, memorialization. In particular, we will examine approaches to abuses and atrocities through a gender lens as well as a specific consideration of children and marginalized groups (e.g., racial, indigenous groups). In some cases, amnesties have been utilized (controversially in, e.g., South Africa). We will critically examine the underlying issues of how peace processes and transitional justice interact and support each other – and in some cases are not productive or fail.

Learning Objectives:  The course has multiple objectives; these include:

• Understanding how transitional justice mechanisms work in practice and how they may support victims and also lead to reforms that target human rights abuses on a societal scale. Examining some of the 40+ transitional justice processes that have occurred and the methods that have been employed. We will evaluate the efficacy of these processes. Ultimately, do these processes move the society to adopt and ensure human rights standards are protected/enforced?
• Understanding consultation processes that are engaged for societal input, particularly among marginalized groups, as a means of determining what process and/or mechanisms, e.g., truth commissions, prosecutions, reparations, reforms, memorialization, will be adopted and adapted to the country.  There will be, in some cases, proposals of the use of amnesties (e.g., South Africa) or innovative approaches, e.g., the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace.
• Examining implementation problems and roadblocks/difficulties/challenges regarding the role of truth commissions or truth-seeking processes, the adoption of reparations, reforms and various criminal justice approaches (see below).
• Assessing strategies for working with victims and affected communities to address the violations that they have suffered. In this regard, memorials that recognize abuses, discrimination or the struggle for justice for victims and recall the violations, which may support memory and stand as markers to prior violations – how important are these efforts? 
• Finally, assessing the role of transitional justice in the United States, given the deep fissures in American society, what relevance do these experiences, both in a range of countries, but also in the United States, e.g., the Truth Commission in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Mass atrocities and conflicts have an enormous impact on victims. Since Nuremberg, policymakers and lawyers have led the way in developing new legal frameworks, definitions, and legal processes to break the cycle of impunity. While painstaking and important progress has been made, particularly focusing on criminal prosecution and documentation, the voices of those most affected by atrocities - victims, survivors, and their communities - tend not to be solicited or given sufficient weight when policymakers design responses to atrocities. The disproportionate political and financial focus on holding perpetrators accountable risks neglecting other measures survivors prioritize, like reparations, truth-telling, memorialization, and searching for missing persons, let alone informal justice and healing processes. This 1-credit seminar will provide Georgetown law students the opportunity to consider how decision-makers can set justice priorities so that victims caught amidst conflict and mass atrocities are not an afterthought, but are placed at the center. We will explore 1-2 specific case studies.

Course Goals/Student Learning Outcomes:

● Understand the arc and architecture of the international justice movement, the current gaps and critiques of the field, and where the field seems to be going.
● Understand the complex landscape of actors, organizations, and institutions, as well as their roles, influence, and interests
● Develop sensitivity to and awareness of how to prioritize the experiences of affected
communities and their perspectives on justice as part of a holistic effort to seek accountability
● Gain a detailed understanding of the multiple strategies and activities necessary for meaningful and holistic justice for atrocities, beyond criminal accountability
● Learn about the strengths and limitations of different types of mechanisms designed to facilitate transitional justice and victim-centered justice processes that enable communities affected by atrocities and conflict to move toward more stable political and social arrangements
● Understand the legal, political, social, jurisprudential, and ethical dimensions of efforts to seek justice for atrocities

Throughout the twentieth century and into the present, international humanitarian law developed not only to regulate the conduct of war, but to punish those who would violate it; be it national prosecutions for war crimes or international criminal courts. In recognition of that fact, international humanitarian law seeks to divide the politics of war from the law of war by requiring minimal standards of due process, even for the most heinous offenders. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, for example, famously provides that in armed conflict, all criminal punishment must be “pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

But what is a "regularly constituted court" and what are indispensable "judicial guarantees"? When war often means a threat to and even a breakdown of civilized society, how is the balance struck between due process, public safety and vindicating the victims of war crimes?

This class will guide students through the salient areas of international criminal law by reading, analyzing and discussing the statutes and precedents from WWII, modern IHL tribunals, and the Military Commissions convened at Guantánamo Bay. The issues covered will range from how crimes are defined, to who is subject to law of war jurisdiction, to theories of liability, to the rules of evidence, including the use of national security information and evidence derived from torture, to the problems associated with distinguishing lawful acts of guerrilla warfare from terrorism.

Over and above this treatment of the substantive aspects of the law, the course will encourage students to consider such problems as fact-finding through adversarial litigation, the reliance on common law crimes, the use of such tribunals in place of domestic courts and truth and reconciliation commissions, and what due process is possible before law of war tribunals.

Students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation and a research paper on one aspect of international criminal law. Course administration will be conducted through CANVAS, where students can download the readings for class.

The law of work is an increasingly important aspect of the global economy. Knowledge of this subject is useful in representing companies, unions, employees, governments and non-governmental organizations. Themes developed in the course also are central to understanding the relationship between law and globalization more broadly. We will study hard and soft law in the various forms in which it operates trans-nationally, including domestic law with foreign effects; public and private international law, such as human rights and trade law; and private codes of corporate social responsibility. The International Labor Organization (ILO), which is a touchstone in the course, is an especially interesting institutional case study: It is the world’s oldest international organization, with 180 member countries giving it near-universal representativeness, and its inclusion of governing roles for civil society groups – unions and employer associations – makes it unique among international institutions. Attention will be given to subordination of documented and undocumented migrants, women, and child laborers.