Hi there

Does anyone know if Harvard or Columbia would be better from an NGO / employer perspective in relation to human rights law? In particular, working in the field of corporate social responsibility / business & human rights.

Many thanks!

Harvard and Columbia don't have HR programs, whereas they surely are plenty of courses related to that field of law. For Corporate HR, as far as I know, GW and GT are the leading schools. For a llm in HR, check Northwestern and Notre Dame

I beg to differ. But Harvard has an excellent Human Rights Concentration in LLM Program. It's one of the four concentrations offered to LLM students.

Columbia has the fellowships for Human Rights.

Definitely Columbia...

Columbia is a great place to study HR. However, HLS has a very good concentration on HR and lots of activities, seminars, and the legal clinics.

GULC offers the Certificate in HR law, and it is very well ranked.

If you are considering Europe too, don't hesitate to apply to Essex.

in this case I would definitively pick the GULC certificate within GT's llm. I didn't apply to either GT or Columbia last year, but let me also tell you that perhaps the best US school to study HR is NYU rather than CLS or Harvard

Notre Dame (only 15 students admitted per year) and CLS for sure... the best human rights lawyers I know have studied at either ND or CLS, that is if you want to do HR lawyering.
Im sure any program at Harvard or GW are excellent as well... A friend studied at Essex in the UK and she now works at FIDH in Paris - managing the human rights SCR project regarding mining companies and HR impact assessments
bonne chance

I think we should define the word program before going into further discussion. CLS has not a program in HR. As Harvard and other top school do, it offers courses in HR, taught for sure by outstanding professors, but it is not a program. Northwestern and ND have programs in HR... I think it is fair to include Georgetown, since it would provide you with some piece of paper other than the LL.M diploma...

I think that Columbia is the best option for international human rights studies as it offers the most extensive variety of (international) human rights courses, clinics and seminars. Besides, one can intern at the United Nations headquarters -being exposed to some of its human rights policy making decisions- during the CLS LLM studies and earn credits for that. The advantage of going to LLMs like CLS or HLS is that all the human rights courses from literally the sea of options that they offer are picked up by each student according to his-her own academic-professional interest: it is not the same human rights lawyers specialized in economic, social or cultural human rights as opposed to those whose area of expertise is reparations for torture victims, just to put an example.
In the case of the so-called HHRR programs like Notre Dame or Northwestern, all the students have to take the same obligatory courses on human rights which reduces the number of electives to get really specialized in a concrete human rights field. So, these HHRR programs may be OK for people who are starting in the HHRR field and obviously need to learn the foundations.
For applicants whose level of academic or professional expertise is higher the options are: CLS, HLS and maybe NYU.