SLAN Mission Statement

The Student Legal Action Network was formed in the spring of 1996 at Columbia Law School as an activist student legal organization. We were dissatisfied with the level of law student activity in the public interest and we formed SLAN in order to serve as a facilitating organization, aimed at increasing that level of activity. We have created this web site and the mailing list in order to bring some of the communicative power of the Internet to that end, and to help fight the atomization of both law schools and law students. We believe that through a more active dialogue, both with each other and with the communities outside the law school and the corporate legal world, law students can render some assistance to those who are in need of it and at the same time see the practical consequences of the law as it is applied by our society, both for good and for ill.

SLAN also sponsors and runs its own activities in the public interest. Currently we are starting a project aimed at transforming the frequent flyer miles earned by law firms into plane flights for those fighting human rights violations across the world. In the spring, we plan to reprise one of our activities from last year, a spring break trip by law students to work against death penalty prosecutions with the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center.