Innovative Practices

Cause lawyering is the practice of law committed to utilizing legal means to build and support movements for social change. Globalization and democratization processes have created new configurations of state power and, with them, new opportunities for altering the political and social status quo.

Cause lawyering students examine how to be activists and represent activists, how to be respectful members of a coalition and how to build coalitions, how to conceptualize a problem within an existing legal order and how to change that order to correct injustice. In this context, our students have an opportunity to engage in groundbreaking advocacy and litigation.

Through human rights initiatives, women have moved from invisibility to visibility, from objects to subjects of international law and policy. In the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic, students examine the use of these initiatives as a potential agent to address the broad gender perspective, including sexuality and gender identities, to facilitate law and policy changes in the area of women's rights, both nationally and internationally