Law Strategic Plan: Deepening Our Commitment to Service
The Law School’s commitment to service lies at the core of our Jesuit identity and is critical in forming Fordham lawyers committed to promoting the rule of law worldwide. Our capacity to meet this challenge is strong—but can be even stronger. As the need for access to justice increases, we will deepen our commitment to service through clinics, pro bono initiatives, and centers and institutes.
“I take great inspiration from the fact that every time I go back to Fordham, it is clear that the School remains steadfastly dedicated to service and justice and contributing to something bigger than itself.”
– Caroline Hsu ’09
Staff Attorney, The Legal Aid Society, Prisoners’ Rights Project
Our clinics’ accomplishments are numerous and include securing access to quality education for children, ensuring family unification by securing legal status for immigrant parents and children, fighting unscrupulous business practices, promoting sustainable development, and defending the human rights of marginalized populations at home and abroad. Our centers and institutes also have a profound impact, addressing social problems, connecting faculty scholarship and ideas to legal actors and constituencies who can draw on the insights and knowledge in their work, and serving as a bridge to engage our students in real-world challenges.
To deepen our culture of service and public interest, the Law School will do the following:
- Enhance and solidify a culture of service across the School by integrating and promoting the vital public service work of clinics, centers and institutes, and related programs.
- Expand students’ ability to explore public interest careers by drawing on the unique expertise and guidance of alumni in public service careers, including our Public Service Advisory Council, by offering more career-centered resources to students interested in public interest and service.
- Provide greater financial aid and loan repayment assistance for students pursuing public interest and public service careers so that all students who seek to explore public interest careers can successfully achieve that goal.
"Good law schools teach people the law. Great law schools help students become professionals who affect the law. One of the distinctive ways Fordham lawyers make a difference is by helping us realize our aspirations to justice. We have inherited a fabulous tradition and we mean to leave it stronger."
– Ian Weinstein
Professor of Law