Law students hit the road for special January short courses

UB Law School students are packing their bags as they prepare for three January courses to be held outside of Buffalo — two of which are outside the United States.

Students will study with faculty in France and New Zealand, as well as Washington, D.C. The courses, part of a broad array of short courses offered in January, bridge the month-long gap between the school’s fall and spring semesters. They offer students the chance to explore a legal subject area in depth and engage in a cultural-immersion experience — crucial given the increasingly globalized nature of law practice.

Professor Stuart Lazar and 12 students are heading to Paris, Brussels and Luxembourg as part of a course entitled “Basics of International Corporate Transactions.” The course begins in Paris, where students will meet up with their counterparts from the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne). 

The course includes readings, lectures and visits to courts and other governmental institutions, as well as with local and international lawyers and accountants to discuss corporate law and other legal issues relating to conducting cross-border transactions. The group also will visit Brussels and Luxembourg, where some legal institutions associated with the European Union are located.  

“Basics of International Transactions” is the second course in which UB law students have had the opportunity to interact with students from the Sorbonne. Last spring, 17 French law students travelled to New York City to learn about international tax issues and visited UB to take part in a seminar on comparative tax law.

Associate Professor Meredith Kolsky Lewis is taking 11 students to Wellington, New Zealand, for two weeks as a component of the course “International Economic Law in Context.” The group will have a number of meetings at the Victoria University of Wellington Law School, where Lewis was based before joining the UB law faculty and where she maintains an academic appointment. The course will cover trade, investment, business and intellectual property issues, as well as points of difference between the New Zealand and U.S. legal systems. 

“Students will have many vantage points from which to compare the New Zealand legal system with our own,” says Lewis. For example, New Zealand does not have a written constitution, has a system of parliamentary sovereignty, has a very different tort law regime from the United States and has different incentives when it comes to protecting intellectual property.

Students will engage with academics, government officials, industry representatives and lawyers in private practice, as well as members of the local Maōri community. The group will also take a number of cultural excursions. 

“I want the students to experience as much as they can, so we’re not going to spend all day in the classroom,” Lewis says. Of course, the fact that it will be summer in New Zealand is another reason to take the learning outside.

Tara J. Melish, associate professor and director of the Buffalo Human Rights Center, will lead a course called “Human Rights Lawyering: Advocacy, Influence and Impact in Washington, D.C.” Her co-instructor will be UB Law alumna Nicole Lee, ’02, former president of the advocacy group TransAfrica Forum and now principal at the public policy advocacy firm Lee Bayard Group. Both instructors, who have significant experience working as human rights lawyers in D.C., are excited to be sharing these experiences with students.

Fourteen students will spend two weeks in Washington, learning about effective strategies for influencing public policy through human rights-related lobbying, legislation, reporting and litigation. They will meet with representatives from all branches of the U.S. government, with intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank, IMF, ILO and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and a wide range of non-governmental human rights organizations, like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the ACLU, CEJIL, and EarthRights International.

They also will network and have mentoring sessions with UB Law alumni in Washington and tour the White House, Supreme Court, Congress and the Holocaust Museum.

“We want students to come away from this course with a hands-on understanding of how human rights law is practiced in real life and the myriad ways that lawyers in all fields play key roles in shaping the opportunity environment in which human rights are struggled over,” says Melish. “There is no one mold for the 21st-century human rights lawyer,” she stresses, “and no better place than Washington, D.C., to understand the full range of strategies U.S.-based advocates and professionals undertake to impact change.”