Learning Lab cohort in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe in April 2024

Robert and Helen Bernstein Institute for Human Rights

Human Rights Research, Advocacy, and Education

The Bernstein Institute for Human Rights is a center at NYU Law committed to challenging legal systems that exclude, marginalize, and oppress. We support and train community justice advocates, law students, and lawyers on legal empowerment methods as a way to actively challenge inequities here in the US and around the world. We believe that the practice of law can and should be rooted in dignity and care.

The work of the Institute is supported by Professor Margaret Satterthwaite ‘99 as Faculty Director and Sukti Dhital as Executive Director.

Our Focus Areas

Institute Updates

New Global Report

The Bernstein Institute for Human Rights is thrilled to share the launch of our global report, Exclusion in Practice: A Human Rights Analysis on the Legal Barriers to Advancing Community Justice. The report explores the power, promise, and struggles of community justice workers—human rights defenders who are key actors in the legal ecosystem. Missed the panel discussion? Watch it here.

Justice Power Relaunched

In 2018, the Bernstein Institute launched Justice Power, a documentation project that partners with directly affected community members, immigration advocates, and lawyers in the United States to highlight legal empowerment strategies that help immigrant communities to know, use, shape, and transform the laws that impact their lives. Our team has spent the past year building relationships with over a dozen new legal empowerment organizations, identifying new strategies, and co-developing how-to guides.

Lab Stories

Jailhouse Lawyers Inititiative

The Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative (JLI), founded by former jailhouse lawyer Jhody Polk, invests in jailhouse lawyers as a core strategy in ending the cycle of incarceration. The JLI fuses legal education, movement building, participatory research, and advocacy to bring visibility to jailhouse lawyers and ensure they have the resources to know, use, and shape law.

illustration of six people in discussion at a table

Barefoot Law

We are excited to share this video featuring one of our partners in the Lab - Tim Kakuru and Barefoot Law in Uganda. Barefoot Law transforms communities and helps build power among the most underserved people in Uganda by using legal empowerment as a tool to expand access to justice.