I. Introduction: The Continuing Domestic and Cross-Border Challenges of Applying, Implementing, Interpreting, and Enforcing a Shared Canon of International Human Rights Treaties
Can the teaching of legal practice skills in any jurisdiction, such as the United States, afford to ignore or be oblivious to the ever-expanding global impact, scope, application, and reach of international human rights law? In these times, law students and legal practitioners inevitably encounter the expansive reach of international human rights law, regardless of the public law or private law dimensions involved in any dispute or matter. Nearly 200 of the world’s states at present are tasked with implementing their international human rights treaty obligations, domestically and internationally. As of this writing, there are nine core international human rights treaties in the United Nations system, each focusing on specific areas of human rights, along with several optional protocols associated with these treaties, expanding or deepening certain protections and establishing proceedings for international claims. These nine core treaties of the United Nations cover a wide range of human rights areas, including, civil and political rights, economic, social, and cultural rights, non-discrimination and equality, protection from torture and cruel treatment, children’s rights, rights of persons with disabilities, rights of migrant workers, and protection from enforced disappearance:
- International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD).
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
- International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
- Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT).
- Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
- International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (ICMW).
- International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (CPED).
- Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
Most countries are States Parties to a majority of the core human rights treaties. On average, states have ratified six to eight of the nine core international human rights treaties. Beyond the core treaties, there are other thematic and regional human rights treaties that focus on specific issues or regions, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, various International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions related to labor rights, treaties related to refugees and stateless persons and regional human rights conventions (with counterpart regional courts interpreting these conventions), such as the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR), and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
There are over one hundred international treaties and agreements related to human rights worldwide, spanning conventions, covenants, charters, protocols, and declarations across multiple organizations and regions. Domestic legal systems that internalize these international legal obligations—whether in monist, dualist, or hybrid jurisdictions—will perennially confront the regulatory, legislative, and judicial challenges of properly interpreting, applying, and implementing these States’ international human rights treaty obligations given their felt impacts on the public, as well as the private, activities of States and their respective populations. The breadth of international human rights treaty law as well as the increasing recognition of unwritten international human rights law (such as customary international human rights law and jus cogens norms on human rights law), thus underscores the growing importance of developing the expertise of law students and future legal practitioners with respect to internationalized and cross-border approaches to claims, representation, and justice for those impacted by the failures of States to respect, protect, and fulfill international human rights treaty and customary law obligations, especially when these also enable non-state actors to contribute to such violations.
This context is not unfamiliar to the United States legal system because it is a party at least to three of the nine core human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Additionally, the U.S. has signed but not ratified others, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. International human rights law is actively litigated before United States courts, and United States nationals, in turn, also access international judicial, arbitral, and related procedures to vindicate their claims of breaches against international human rights treaties and customary law obligations. Not only is the globalization of law and United States law practice inevitable, but teaching international human rights law practices in United States law school clinics has rapidly become the norm, rather than the exception. This is par for the course in the globalization of human rights law. The challenge for today’s United States law school clinics lies with developing clinical pedagogy and instruction that is also attuned to international human rights law methodology. In this Article, we describe the human rights methodology for clinical instruction developed in the Notre Dame Law School Global Human Rights Clinic’s interdisciplinary, cooperative, and collaborative hybrid approach between law students (JD, LLM in International Human Rights Law students, JSD students) as well as undergraduate and graduate students from other disciplines, which structures human rights fact-finding, case intake, legal research, and cross-border reparations planning to realize human rights outcomes for clients.
II. Situating Global Human Rights Law in U.S. Clinical Legal Education
A. History of U.S. Clinical Legal Education
The history of U.S. clinical legal education reflects an evolution through various models, each shaped by the changing needs of legal practice and public service. Originally, legal education in the U.S. followed an apprenticeship model, where students learned by working directly under practicing attorneys. But the establishment of the Harvard case method in 1870 marked a shift toward formalized legal education, which focused more on theoretical analysis than on practical client work. This approach set the stage for future developments in clinical education as law schools began to reconsider the balance between theory and practice in legal training.
Over time, the model shifted from purely hands-on client work to a blend of practical and theoretical approaches, with different stages of emphasis. Early clinical programs began with the “direct service” model, which aimed to provide legal aid to low-income clients while allowing students to develop foundational skills in real-world contexts. This model prioritized service to underserved communities and grounded legal training in immediate, tangible client work.
The “law reform” model followed, focusing on cases with broad social implications and policy reform. This approach encouraged the use of law as a tool for social change, moving beyond individual service to address systemic issues. Clinical programs under this model began emphasizing social justice, with students working on cases that could impact larger legal and policy landscapes.
The “participant-observer” model then emerged, allowing students to observe and analyze legal institutions with a focus on understanding broader systemic impacts. This model introduced a more analytical approach to clinical education, encouraging students to critically examine how legal institutions function and affect individuals and communities.
Today’s clinical legal education often follows the “teaching law firm” model, which integrates elements from previous models. This approach combines practical client representation with academic instruction, creating a holistic, practice-oriented environment that mirrors an operational law firm. Students gain hands-on experience under close faculty supervision, developing both technical skills and an understanding of the ethical and social dimensions of legal practice. This contemporary model reflects a comprehensive approach to clinical education, balancing skill-building, social justice reform, and institutional analysis to prepare students for the complexities of modern legal practice.
Each stage in the development of clinical legal education highlights shifts in focus, from practical skills training to social reform and institutional critique, underscoring the adaptability and growing depth of clinical programs in U.S. law schools.
B. The Internationalization of U.S. Law Clinics
Clinical education in U.S. law schools bridges the gap between classroom theory and experiential learning in actual legal practice. This approach has become a critical element of legal education, equipping students with practical skills through supervised, real-life casework. Central to the success of these programs are the collaborations between non-clinical law faculty who bring their expertise in theory and doctrine, and the clinical faculty and staff who bring their field experiences into the classroom, jointly offering students insights into legal work that applies academic theory to real life disputes. In recent years, U.S. legal clinics, increasingly supported by adjunct and temporary faculty as well as professors of the practice, have expanded their operations to serve international clients, particularly in the Global South. This shift involves U.S. legal methodologies being applied to assist in addressing human rights issues in regions such as Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia. The goal is not only to provide practical legal education but also to contribute to legal reform and promote access to justice in these underserved regions. The U.S. clinical model, with its focus on client-centered advocacy and practical legal skills, is seen as a valuable tool for addressing local challenges and advancing justice, and supporting human rights advocacy, public interest law, and strategic litigation, while also aligning with the broader objectives of democratization and legal empowerment in these regions of the world.
But the transplantation of U.S. legal methods to the Global South can present some significant challenges, particularly due to the differing legal cultures and systems, as well as legitimacy critiques as to the grafting of North American law practices to a very multicultural and legally heterogeneous Global South. Many regions in the Global South operate under civil law, hybrid or mixed legal regimes or other non-adversarial systems, which may not align with the U.S. model of clinical legal education that thus far has often emphasized client-centered advocacy and adversarial processes. U.S. clinics working internationally must adjust their methods to better complement local legal traditions, which tend to prioritize social stability, legal empowerment, and local legal priorities over the U.S. approach to court victories in litigation and policy successes in advocacy. These adjustments require clinical instructors to be culturally sensitive and pedagogically adaptive in their teaching methods and casework strategies.
The expansion of U.S. clinical programs’ activities to clients, cases, and projects abroad represents a significant step in global legal education, with potential for lasting impact. These programs contribute to legal reform by introducing U.S. methodologies, but they also highlight the importance of cultural sensitivity and complementarity in such efforts. The future of international clinical programs lies in their ability to establish sustainable collaborations with local legal institutions and practitioners as equal partners seeking justice, ensuring that these initiatives have a meaningful and lasting impact on evolving legal education and law practice in the Global South. By focusing on long-term partnerships and the unique needs of local communities, U.S. clinical programs can make a significant pedagogic contribution to the shared development of legal systems worldwide.
C. The Shift Towards Global Legal Skills Well Beyond IRAC
Effective analytical skills are essential in global legal education, encompassing research, analysis, and interpretation. Research skills are foundational in law, allowing students to gather, evaluate, and synthesize legal sources and precedents. In an international context, research becomes even more complex as students must also familiarize themselves with international treaties, foreign case law, and cross-jurisdictional legal sources. This requires adaptability to different legal research databases, learning comparative and international law techniques of interpretation and theories of jurisprudence that are contained in the decisions of courts, tribunals, and all other adjudicative bodies in jurisdictions worldwide. The universe of legal sources and jurisprudence is vast, and the potential for any law student to be drowned in the cacophony is even greater.
Developing analytical methodologies that inform legal research, assessment, and application of multiple legal sources is equally critical, as it involves evaluating the implications of legal texts and very often, variable quality and forms of evidence as to facts that have taken place overseas. For global practitioners, analysis means comparing legal principles across different jurisdictions while accounting for cultural differences and understanding the varied legal frameworks that govern diverse regions. Interpretation is another key skill that involves deciphering legal texts, statutes, and case law to apply them to real-world situations. In a global context, interpretation requires not only an understanding of legal language but also the ability to navigate differences in statutory construction and the contextual nuances that arise in varying legal systems. Working on cross-border cases involving a range of language competencies and likely resort to translations also necessarily affects the interpretive content of legal language.
Legal communication and argumentation skills are indispensable for lawyers practicing in international settings. Effective communication entails conveying complex legal ideas clearly and persuasively to a range of audiences. In a global environment, this skill also involves cross-cultural sensitivity, especially when addressing legal terminology and differing norms across legal traditions. Negotiation, another critical skill, involves reaching mutually beneficial agreements while respecting the interests of all parties involved. International legal practice requires understanding diverse negotiation styles, which may differ significantly across cultural and legal contexts, such as collective bargaining or individual mediation.
Drafting is another essential skill in global practice. Lawyers must create legal documents that are clear, precise, and enforceable, which varies significantly across jurisdictions. Understanding the conventions for drafting in different legal systems, including differences in language and document structure, is necessary for success in international practice. Argumentative skills, crucial in legal advocacy, enable lawyers to construct persuasive and logical arguments. Globally, these skills require adaptation to different procedural expectations and the argumentative styles of varying legal systems, whether civil, common, or hybrid law traditions.
Global legal practice demands additional skills such as comparative analysis, question framing, and heuristics. Comparative analysis allows practitioners to examine and contrast laws across multiple jurisdictions, helping them understand similarities, differences, and best practices. This skill is particularly important for global practitioners as it aids in identifying legal risks and applying insights gained from one jurisdiction to another. Framing legal questions is another vital skill, especially in complex, international contexts. This involves identifying the core issues of a case and tailoring legal solutions based on the cultural, social, and political dimensions that influence legal processes in different regions. Heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, are strategies used by lawyers to quickly assess unfamiliar or complex situations, while mindful of the limitations to relying excessively or exclusively on heuristics alone. In international practice, lawyers rely on heuristics to navigate diverse legal landscapes, identify relevant legal frameworks, and apply learned principles in novel contexts. This enables them to respond effectively despite the challenges posed by different legal systems.
Global human rights clinics thus now adopt a holistic approach to legal training. This experiential learning environment emphasizes not just theoretical knowledge but also practical skills such as negotiation, communication, and analytical thinking. The goal of a global human rights clinic, as Whalen-Bridge (2014) highlights, is not to teach students the traditional IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) method but to integrate a broader set of portable global legal skills to work effectively in diverse and real-world legal contexts.
IV. Case Study Example: Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the Notre Dame Law School Global Human Rights Clinic
The Notre Dame Law School Global Human Rights Clinic is the first clinic of its kind in Notre Dame Law School’s 154-year history, building on over half a century of its well-established LLM Program in International Human Rights Law. Established under the “teaching law firm” model, the clinic combines law students at all levels (Juris Doctor, LLM in International Human Rights Law students, and doctoral candidates or JSDs) with undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines. This integration allows for a dynamic and interdisciplinary approach to human rights work, where legal students focus on the application of both international and domestic law, that influences the human rights outcome for the client, while students from other fields contribute to human rights fact-finding, including using digital and open-source investigations apart from primary source investigations, that are applicable to a spectrum of international human rights courts, tribunals, bodies, and other forms of remedial mechanisms and procedures. In tandem with the Law School’s LL.M. Program in International Human Rights Law, the Clinic incorporates principles of natural law, jurisprudence, and global human rights law to inform its teaching methods, while also collaborating with the Notre Dame Reparations Design and Compliance Lab on its interdisciplinary and mixed methods research.
The clinic not only teaches professional responsibility and ethics under International Bar Association standards, but it also engages in real-world human rights representation, education, and advocacy work in all continents in the world. This holistic approach underscores the importance of combining academic pedagogy with practical skills training, which is central to the effectiveness of the clinic in teaching law students and non-law students that realizing the human rights outcome entails applying both legal and interdisciplinary problem-solving in human accompaniment with the client, to determine appropriate legal remedies and durable human rights reparations that are appropriately anchored in the correct jurisdictional and applicable legal approaches and strategies. The clinical instruction is overseen by the Faculty Director, with pedagogic involvement from the Faculty Board of Advisors and the Dean, ensuring that the faculty and staff provide doctrinal and procedural substance, strategic guidance, professional direction, and educational support to law and non-law students alike. The Staff Attorney and Fellows receive professional guidance, strategic direction, and pedagogic training from the Faculty Director in executing representation, advocacy, and education strategies for a diverse range of individual, group, and institutional clients.
Clinic clients include institutional, group, human rights or civil society organizations, national or local government actors, as well as individual clients from regions such as Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The clinic partners with a wide range of international organizations, including the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations International Organization of Migration, UNICEF Innocenti, alongside co-counsel arrangements with leading global law firms where Notre Dame Law School alumni are especially active. The Clinic also partners with around 600 foreign human rights attorneys, jurists, academics, and legal policy practitioners around the world who have graduated from its LLM Program in International Human Rights Law, ensuring unique but also shared vocabularies in international human rights law theory and discursive applications. This extensive network reinforces the clinic’s focus on building Global Legal Skills, an integral part of Notre Dame’s renowned global human rights law curriculum. Through this structure, the clinic helps students and professionals apply international legal principles to human rights challenges worldwide.
Clinic methodology purposely employs a heavily interdisciplinary approach to human rights fact-finding, evidence evaluation, and the application of remedial mechanisms across international human rights courts, tribunals, and bodies. By integrating qualitative and quantitative evaluations of evidence, students enhance their global legal skills through interdisciplinary approaches that address complex human rights issues. The clinic’s work emphasizes the importance of effective human rights advocacy, promoting legal solutions while engaging with broader social, political, and legal contexts in international settings. The Notre Dame Global Human Rights Clinic exemplifies how clinical instruction can combine the theoretical pedagogies on natural law, jurisprudence, and global human rights law developed in half a century of Notre Dame Law School’s LLM Program in International Human Rights Law with practical, real-world experiences of working with international partners and alumni— the vast majority of which are in the Global South. By offering hands-on training for law students and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration with non-law students, the clinic helps create a unique ecosystem for global legal skills development focused on understanding the “human” in human rights and human dignity first, before conceptualizing legal strategies to achieve appropriate redress, feasible, and just reparative measures. The ambition is to help realize the human rights outcome for victims of state and non-state international human rights treaty and customary law violations, anywhere in the world.
V. Internalizing Global Human Rights Analysis in U.S. Clinical Practice
A. Strategic Remedial Analysis under Global Human Rights Law
Strategic Remedial Analysis under Global Human Rights Law introduces a nuanced approach that extends beyond the standard IRAC (Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion) diagnostic framework. This method incorporates a broad range of substantive and procedural components drawn from international and regional treaties, customary international law, and foreign laws in various jurisdictions. Additionally, it draws on jurisprudence across international, regional, and domestic courts, tribunals, and other adjudicative bodies and mechanisms. This comprehensive approach equips students with the tools to deeply explore and evaluate remedial possibilities for clients, allowing for a more expansive understanding of rights protection.
In clinical teaching, integrating a human rights approach means drawing on multiple legal sources, such as national laws, international human rights treaties, regional human rights systems jurisprudence, and soft law instruments. This method not only strengthens the basis for legal claims but also enriches the analytical depth of students’ work. It encourages them to incorporate comparative legal perspectives, thus enhancing the persuasiveness and completeness of their arguments. By recognizing and addressing violations within national legal frameworks as well as breaches of international obligations, clinical teaching provides students with a wide-ranging view of legal recourse and reinforces their understanding of cross-system rights protection.
The clinic also emphasizes the development of effective legal arguments based on human rights standards. This approach moves away from compartmentalizing cases as strictly “tort,” “contract,” or “criminal” matters. Instead, students are encouraged to frame their arguments with a focus on realizing the client’s human rights outcomes, regardless of the formal categorization of the case. This enables both law and non-law students to approach legal challenges through a human rights lens, ensuring a focus on the broader implications of rights protection and justice.
Tailoring legal strategies to address different types of human rights violations is another core component of this methodology. This includes crafting specific approaches for various types of cases, whether they involve issues related to civil liberties, socioeconomic rights, or environmental justice, for example. Providing national and international examples of successful mitigation and redress strategies, as well as showing students the tangible impact of well-crafted human rights advocacy, creates a replicable blueprint for effective and well-targeted problem-solving in the field of global human rights law.
This analytical approach is also reflected in U.S. case law, where landmark decisions serve as key examples of framing, mitigation, and redress through a human rights-oriented methodology. These cases illustrate how courts have applied nuanced reasoning to address complex rights violations, among them:
1. Filártiga v. Peña-Irala (1980)
In this landmark case, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a Paraguayan family to sue a Paraguayan government official in U.S. courts for torture committed in Paraguay. The case was brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which permits foreign nationals to seek remedies in U.S. courts for human rights violations committed abroad. The court applied international human rights standards to recognize torture as a violation of international law, setting a precedent for the use of U.S. courts to address global human rights violations. This case exemplifies how integrating international human rights norms into U.S. legal frameworks can lead to comprehensive legal remedies for victims.
2. Boumediene v. Bush (2008)
In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus petitions, despite being outside U.S. sovereign territory. The Court applied principles of human rights law, particularly focusing on the right to a fair trial and protection against arbitrary detention, to reach its decision. The human rights methodology in this case included assessing the U.S. government’s actions under international human rights norms, emphasizing the protection of fundamental rights even during wartime.
3. Hernandez v. Mesa (2017)
This case involved the shooting of a Mexican teenager by a U.S. Border Patrol agent across the U.S.-Mexico border. The victim’s family brought a lawsuit under the Bivens doctrine, which allows for civil suits against federal officers for constitutional violations. The plaintiffs invoked international human rights standards, including the right to life and protection from arbitrary killing, to argue that the Border Patrol agent’s actions violated both U.S. constitutional and international human rights law. Although the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the agent, this case highlighted the use of human rights methodologies in framing legal arguments around state accountability for cross-border violence.
B. Global Human Rights Fact-Finding Methodologies Harness Innovation in the Presentation and Development of Cases
Global Human Rights Fact-Finding Methodologies leverage innovative approaches for developing and presenting cases. These methodologies encompass expansive interviewing, fact-finding, and verification tools grounded in global human rights law and bolstered by interdisciplinary methods, including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. This approach allows practitioners to identify and document human rights violations while also examining the range of actors who could bear legal responsibility. The methodology’s interdisciplinary scope supports a more comprehensive picture of violations, enabling a holistic perspective on accountability and justice.
Increasingly, human rights practitioners rely on open-source investigation, largely out of necessity. Many human rights violations occur in environments marked by violence, conflict, or repression, where researchers face significant safety risks. For that reason, the use of social media including platforms such as X, Facebook, Telegram, and others, to identify victims, perpetrators, and localize the place where the violation took place is becoming more and more common now that human rights defenders are under threat in many regions of the world. An entirely law-driven assessment of probative value, admissibility, and the sufficiency of evidence—testimonial, object, forensic, documentary, and digital—is essential to support these investigations’ reliability and legality.
In response to the challenges posed by misinformation and data verification, practitioners have promoted the use of innovative tools, often with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence, to ensure accurate identification of violations. This is the case of Amnesty International Evidence Lab, which, through its initiative ‘Digital Verification Corps’, engages students worldwide to authenticate videos and images found on social media to support human rights research. This initiative has helped in the identification of killings, corruption and land grabs against the Rohingya in Myanmar or the mapping of tear gas misuse in twenty two countries and territories on five continents
In addition, the large amount of data required to prove certain violations (such as crimes against humanity), has resulted in the creation of multiple online databases that use advanced technology to establish certain patterns across violations. The Notre Dame Law School Global Human Rights Clinic is working in tandem with client human rights organizations in Haiti and Venezuela, and with international partners, to develop its pilot database for case monitoring, trend analysis, and empirical investigation of conditions and circumstances faced by mass victims of systematic violations through State repression (such as in Venezuela) as well as violence and oppression by non-State actors (such as by gangs in Haiti).
C. Global Human Rights Law Standards Themselves Provide the Contextual and Textual Dialogic Benchmarks for Law Students
Integrating human rights assessments into clinical approach means that students will work in understanding the broader legal, social, and historical context of a case, allowing a more holistic analysis of the legal claims and the roots of the wrongful act. This allows for a more effective litigation strategy and provides reparative justice for global human rights victims of complex human rights violations. In order to ensure a holistic analysis of the legal claims, good documentation is essential. This implies that students gather data in conformity with a particular framework defining the victim profile through her age, vulnerabilities, demographics, and various forms of discrimination to which she is exposed. The human rights methodology of documentation facilitates the identification of patterns offering a structured way to analyze systemic abuses and ways to address them from individual or collective claims.
A human rights assessment in clinical teaching also means that students will learn how to design remedies that go beyond traditional compensation, crafting solutions that seek to holistically address the harm caused by rights violations from a human dignity perspective. These “integral” reparations aim to restore victims not just financially, but multidimensionally, acknowledging that the damage caused by human rights violations is multifaceted and often systemic. This also allows the incorporation of other manifestations of justice, such as restorative justice mechanisms (e.g., public apologies, memorialization) and reinforce the victim-centered approach of cases, to ensure that reparations reflect the actual needs and priorities of those affected, making remedies more meaningful and effective.
Identification of the victim in the human rights context may be an arduous task. First, because the category of victim can extend beyond those who directly suffer physical harm. International standards recognize that individuals, groups, or even entire communities may be considered victims if they experience emotional, psychological, or economic harm as a result of crimes or violations. Second, because victims are often unaware of the rights they have and therefore do not know what protection or redress should be awarded to them. This obliges the practitioner to work with the victim on learning some human rights law education so that the victim can decide freely on the desired outcome from the legal proceedings that could follow. Third, trauma can also be a burden to identify potential victims as many would not be ready to share their story. This requires empathy and gaining the client’s trust, from a perspective of professional accompaniment rather than prescriptive detachment. Fourth, some victims will be at risk when sharing their story, thus making it an obligation for the practitioner to ensure their clients’ safety as an intrinsic part of the ultimate legal strategy devised in consultation with the clients.
Identifying the perpetrator is also a challenge in the human rights context. Of this fact, perpetrators are also aware, making their cooperation very unlikely. Students assess the power relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, which may be crucial when state actors or government officials are responsible for the violation. At the same time, it is useful for students to understand that perpetrators can include a wide range of state and non-state actors. Understanding the rules of attribution for international and criminal responsibility, as established in international standards, allows students and practitioners to broaden the scope of potential accountable parties. For example, concepts such as public mandate, effective control, representation, and chain of command help us identify those who bear responsibility.
VI. Conclusion
Integrating global human rights law methodologies with U.S. clinical practices offers a unique opportunity to elevate legal education and enhance the quality of legal assessments. By emphasizing rigorous, holistic fact-finding and viability assessments, clinics can strengthen evaluations of certain claims, ensuring that students gain the skills needed to navigate complex legal landscapes. Blending international and domestic law within practical legal assessments teaches students to appreciate the interconnectedness of various legal systems while enhancing their ability to approach cases with a broader legal, strategic, and human perspective.
Additionally, equipping students with tools for empathy-driven client accompaniment and victim-centered approaches not only strengthens their legal acumen but fosters an ethical, compassionate approach to client representation. Incorporating a wider range of primary and secondary evidence tools allows students to explore diverse sources of information, facilitating more comprehensive legal analyses. Moreover, by promoting an understanding of remedies beyond traditional frameworks, including global insights on victim redress and reparative justice, clinics can prepare students to offer broader solutions that take into account the multifaceted nature of human rights violations as experienced by survivors of these violations throughout their lifetimes. We encourage the application of these interdisciplinary methodologies as more U.S. law clinics purposely embrace global legal skills development. Adopting such approaches will deepen students’ understanding of certain claims and enrich their ability to assist in the ultimate mission of enabling justice, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, preparing them for more well-rounded, client-sensitive, responsible, ethical, and effective lawyering in U.S. as well as global contexts.
