Human Rights | NYU School of Law

Margaret Satterthwaite ’99 has engaged in human rights work in places such as Haiti, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, the United States, and Yemen.
Philip Alston is the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
Ryan Goodman's work makes significant contributions to the law of armed conflict, human rights law, and US national security law.

In the Name of Dignity

States today face supranational scrutiny with respect to how they treat individuals within their own territories, including their own citizens. Whether this scrutiny occurs in the United Nations or in human rights courts, international human rights regimes challenge the very conception of “inter-state” law.

NYU School of Law prepares students to work in this growing arena by offering a wide range of courses and clinics taught by faculty in the vanguard of human rights work, including Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Margaret Satterthwaite ’99, whose interdisciplinary work involving using information graphics to tell human rights stories received a MacArthur Foundation grant, and Ryan Goodman, an interdisciplinary scholar and an editor-in-chief of Just Security, whose work makes significant contributions to human rights law.

The Robert and Helen Bernstein Institute for Human Rights promotes cutting-edge scholarship, advocacy, and education on human rights issues, and serves as a coordinating hub for existing human rights work at NYU, including the Center for Human Rights & Global Justice and the US-Asia Law Institute. Students pursuing human rights work will also find guaranteed summer funding and post-graduate fellowships in prominent nonprofits. The LLM in International Legal Studies also offers opportunities for further development in this area.