Our policy, advocacy, and innovation Lab courses are lower-credit experiential learning courses that provide hands-on opportunities for NYU Law students to combine creative problem solving with their legal knowledge to develop cutting-edge solutions to society’s most challenging problems. Using an expansive range of lawyering strategies, students and clinical faculty work in collaboration with communities, government agencies, and non-profit organizations to advance innovative solutions to entrenched social and legal problems and make justice more accessible to marginalized communities.
Application to our Lab courses occurs at the same time as applications for Clinics and Externships.
- Communication, Law, and Social Justice Lab
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This Lab course introduces students to the role that written, oral, and multi-media communications play in advancing social justice and supporting movements. Using as case studies advocacy for racial equity, criminal justice reform, immigrant rights, gun rights, environmental protection, reproductive justice, and economic opportunity, students will learn how change agents on multiple sides have used strategic framing and messaging, communications campaigns, and art and culture to influence – and in some instances transform – relevant law and policy. Utilizing that knowledge, students will work with select communities and organizations to advance their vision of community justice through a combination of communications and policy advocacy.
- Community Equity Lab
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The goal of community equity is to create vital and dynamic communities of opportunity where all people can thrive. Community equity is a framework that advances the equitable distribution of benefits and harms across communities and recognizes the collective investments that community residents make over time to build security, well-being, and belonging. Community equity is central to the fight for racial justice, democracy, and economic inclusion. Advancing community equity requires us to reimagine how we use the law to strengthen marginalized communities and allow the people who live there to lead choice-filled lives. The Community Equity Lab provides students an opportunity to work with community members and community-based institutions to build a community-centered vision of justice, and the tools necessary to achieve it. Students will explore larger ideas around the meaning of community equity while combining their creativity with an expansive range of lawyering skills and advocacy strategies to challenge entrenched legal problems facing communities of color and other marginalized communities. (Not offered 25-26)
- Environmental and Climate Justice Lab
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Core concepts of the Environmental and Climate Justice Movements include not only distributive justice, with the goal of addressing inequalities on the basis of race, class, indigenous affiliation and disability in access to fresh air, clean water, and a safe play for children to play, and also procedural justice, the right to self-determination. The Environmental and Climate Justice Lab will provide students with opportunities to represent community-based organizations in their efforts to address gross disparities in environmental benefits and burdens – and particularly the impacts of climate change. At the same time, the right to self-determination applies not only to government decision-making but also other players and stakeholders – industry officials proposing to place facilities with environmental impacts in proximity to already environmentally overburdened communities, scientists who study the environmental and health effects of pollution, and the lawyers who engage or represent communities. The Lab will also provide students with a hands-on opportunity to explore complex questions about community lawyering and the role of the lawyer in social change movements: for example, what role do lawyers play in movements that center communities as decision-makers? How can lawyers engage in case selection and other activities central to practice consistent with principles of community self-determination? How does community lawyering align with rules of ethics? These questions are all the more pressing as community-based organizations seek to advance justice in a quickly changing political context at local, state, and federal levels. The Lab docket will assist students in developing core lawyering skills, such as awareness of ethnical, cultural and professional issues, written and oral communication, interviewing clients and experts, drafting, legal analysis, negotiation, factual investigation, and developing, initiating, and resolving litigation.
- Law and Organizing Lab
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The Law and Organizing Lab is designed to help students to develop and apply a broad range of analytical and change-making tools. Making ambitious change often requires a sophisticated understanding of community, politics, and power. Organizing, public policy advocacy and issue campaigning are fields that have developed valuable tools and techniques to spark change. These tools and techniques can and should strengthen students’ legal practice. The Lab will help students to develop new capacities and to deploy a sophisticated understanding of social change organizing and campaigning, and realpolitik—in partnership with deeply-rooted community organizations working for racial and economic justice.
- Narrative Strategies for Advancing Justice Lab
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This lab course will focus on strategies for advancing reforms within the U.S. criminal legal system and broadly advancing racial justice in American society. We will look at the history of race in America and the evolution of criminal justice, punishment and over-incarceration. The seminar will explore new approaches to thinking about and using narrative tactics to advance policy change and how they intersect with traditional litigation and advocacy. Students will work with the staff of the Equal Justice Initiative on cases, projects, new reports and publications during the course of the semester. All students will also spend several days in Montgomery visiting the Legacy Sites as part of the course. Students will be required to spend four hours a week at the EJI New York City office. Course is limited to 8 students, application and interview required.
- Pretrial Abolition Lab
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The Pretrial Abolition Lab examines the systemic harms of pretrial incarceration and the growing body of research that debunks its efficacy and necessity. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students explore public education and narrative change, conduct research and design pilot projects, develop strategic litigation and law reform strategies, and study innovative non-carceral alternatives to pretrial detention. The Lab empowers students to analyze pretrial practices, create practical solutions, and reimagine a pretrial system without pretrial incarceration.