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While a student at Columbia Law School, Peggy Hicks (LAW'88) spent a semester interning at Interights, a London-based organization where she worked on cases before the European Court of Human Rights. Now the global advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, Hicks credits Columbia for setting her on her career course.

"I knew I wanted to work in public international law but I wasn't sure how to pursue a career in that, and in what area," said Hicks. The law school's internship program "gave me hands-on exposure to how my legal studies could be directed to making a real difference in the lives of those suffering from human rights abuses."

Columbia is one of the first universities to have created a curriculum in human rights, and the study of human rights is threaded throughout nearly every graduate and undergraduate school at Columbia, offering courses, concentrations and multiple master's programs for those who want to teach or practice the subject. Courses range from "Peacemaking/Peacekeeping" to "Sexuality, Gender and Human Rights" and to "First Amendment Values." There are a crop of degree programs, including at Mailman School of Public Health, Barnard College, the School of International and Public Affairs and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Hicks, who majored in Russian/East European studies as an undergraduate, was drawn to Columbia's Harriman Institute and the public international law component at the law school, where she was exposed to a plethora of human rights-related courses. Another key attraction, she said, was the opportunity to study under law professors Louis Henkin and Jack Greenberg—both considered giants in the world of human rights law. Henkin, University Professor Emeritus, is widely credited for having pioneered the field of human rights law.

"Human rights has been taught as part of the mainstream of our curriculum longer than anywhere else, largely due to Henkin," said Peter Rosenblum, professor of human rights and faculty co-director of the Human Rights Institute at the Law School. "Because he was such a towering figure, both in human rights and at the law school, there was a real pride of place here."

Said Elazar Barkan, co-director of Columbia's Center for the Study of Human Rights, "the curriculum here is much more than just the legal perspective...We have a more comprehensive perspective on human rights." Barkan is also a professor of international and public affairs at SIPA.

For Priscilla Hayner (SIPA'93), that extra perspective was critical. "SIPA's broad focus geographically and thematically provided me with the opportunity to dip into brownbag seminars on an almost daily basis, considerably expanding my familiarity with conflict situations and policy developments." she said. Hayner, who received her master's in international affairs with a concentration in Latin America, went on to co-found the International Center for Transitional Justice and currently heads its Geneva office.

As the world of human rights changes, so does the University's curriculum. "In the past, the human rights concentration was more legally oriented," said Barkan, "but now it addresses issues like social justice, inequality, human fairness and human dignity rather than just adherence to human rights conventions and human rights laws."

At the law school, budding lawyers can choose from a wide range of public interest law and human rights law courses, including immigration law and policy, prisoner abuse and the global war on terror, and transnational business and human rights.

Human rights "is interdisciplinary and it's even interdisciplinary within the law school," said Rosenblum, who taught at Harvard before joining Columbia six years ago. At other universities, "nobody taught trade law with an eye on human rights or global investment with an eye on human rights. Here, that's not the case. Here, there's an ease of overlap in those areas that has been really, really important."

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