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Center for Law and Global Justice
Click a tack to explore!North America
USF law faculty and students are involved in a broad range of social justice activities in North America. Students participating in the Frank C. Newman International Human Rights Law Clinic prepare reports for and present to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women in New York City. The Keta Taylor Colby Death Penalty Project brings students to the American South to help defend death row inmates, while faculty work to eradicate the death penalty and juvenile life without parole sentences in the United States. Faculty-directed research at USF also focuses on human rights issues arising from the war on terror.
Central America and the Caribbean
Internships and volunteer initiatives have brought students to Central America and the Caribbean. In the Dominican Republic, students visit congested prisons, Haitian refugee communities, and government offices to investigate discrimination experienced by Haitian migrant families. Students may continue this research via virtual internships in San Francisco with the Haiti Institute for Justice and Democracy. Students have also interned at the Human Rights Institute at the Central American University in El Salvador, where they learned about the country's civil war through meetings with lawyers, judges, guerrillas, professors, and laypeople.
South America
During internships in Argentina, USF law students soak in the culture of Cordoba and Buenos Aires while learning about South American law. Students receive instruction on the Argentinean legal system and its relationship to regional and international law before embarking on internships with private and governmental offices. The center's International Internship Program began in Brazil in the 1990s, under the direction of Professor Jack Garvey.
Europe
Students learn about European Law through international internships, study-abroad programs, faculty exchanges, and coursework. In Bilbao, Spain, students receive instruction on the European legal system and work for judicial and government offices, private firms, and NGOs. Participants in the Frank C. Newman International Human Rights Law Clinic travel to Geneva, Switzerland, where they research and prepare presentations for the U.N. Human Rights Council on critical human rights issues, such as migrants' rights, application of the death penalty to juveniles, and trafficking of women. Students may travel to Dublin, Ireland, and/or Prague, Czech Republic, to learn about the emerging E.U. legal system in different national contexts. European law professors also visit and teach at USF, where students may take courses exploring international and European law.
Africa
Faculty and students have travelled to Africa to research and increase their understanding of juvenile life sentences, affirmative action, and criminal law. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Professor Sharon Meadows assisted in the establishment of criminal juvenile law clinics and pilot public defender systems in South Africa. Working with Lawyers Without Borders and the U.S. State Department, Assistant Professor Henry Brown has collaborated with attorneys and magistrates in Kenya to prosecute domestic violence cases and crimes against women. Director of Human Rights Programs Michelle Leighton focuses her research on climate migration and its effects on vulnerable populations in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the late 1990s, Professor Dolores Donovan taught human rights and criminal justice law to future judges and prosecutors at the Ethiopian Civil Service College as a Fulbright professor.
Asia
Since its founding, the Center for Law and Global Justice has played an active role in the promotion of justice and democracy in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. As part of the Cambodia Law and Democracy Project, USF brought Cambodians to USF to continue legal studies that had been interrupted by the Pol Pot regime. As early as 1990, faculty were working at the Thai-Cambodian border with Cambodian refugees that had been displaced by the Khmer Rouge and subsequent Vietnamese occupation. The center has created teaching materials for a Cambodian law curriculum and labor law compliance in China's toy factories, as well as Cambodian and Vietnamese judicial training materials that provide guidance for decision-making, labor law, and genocide. The center offers a course on Cambodian genocide and numerous internships in Asia.
Mission
The Center for Law and Global Justice is a focal point for USF School of Law's commitment to international justice and legal education with a global perspective. The center generates student internships around the globe, protects and enforces human rights through litigation and advocacy, manages and participates in international rule of law programs in developing nations, develops partnerships with world-class foreign law schools, provides a forum for student scholarship, and nurtures an environment where student-organized conferences and international speakers explore topics relating to global justice.
The center is interdisciplinary in nature, often embarking on initiatives that meld law and anthropology, business, economics, or political science. In furtherance of the university's mission of Educating Minds and Hearts to Change the World, the center promotes partnerships between the law school and the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Business and Professional Studies, the Center for the Pacific Rim, and the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good.