About the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges
The Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges is an independent Center that bridges the divide between the legal academy and legal practice on global legal issues. It provides a forum where academic experts and students regularly interact with public and private sector actors responsible for addressing global legal challenges. By bringing these communities together, the Center aims to inject new ideas into legal policy debates and grow a new generation of lawyers with a sense of their capacity and responsibility to use international law, foreign affairs law, and national security law to address real challenges facing the nation.
The Center’s Goals
The Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges aims to promote understanding of and innovative approaches to legal issues of global importance. It has three key goals:
Creating a new generation of international lawyers by changing the way international law is taught. Traditionally, international law teaching has been limited to the classroom. The Center aims to change this by engaging students in real-world legal challenges confronted by policymakers in Washington, D.C., and beyond. The Center’s International Law and Foreign Affairs Practicum offers students hands-on opportunities to address global legal challenges. The Center also supports student research, student-led conferences, and guest speakers to promote this goal.
Bringing the world of international law and foreign affairs to Yale. The Center sponsors speakers from government, international law practice, and academia to speak to issues of real world importance. In the process, the Center seeks to promote student interest in and knowledge of issues relating to law that has consequences beyond U.S. borders.
Strengthening faculty work and disseminating ideas to the world. The Center supports work by law faculty—and by budding international law scholars—on international law, foreign affairs law, and national security law projects that have real world implications. Specifically, the Center offers law school faculty and students a forum for presenting their work, encourages collaboration on shared initiatives, and supports the dissemination of their ideas to the policy community outside academia.
