International Law at Fordham Law

These days, what happens overseas—to people and businesses— is as crucial to being a successful lawyer as what happens across town. Our extensive International Law curriculum, seminars, workshops, and clinics will prepare you wherever and for whatever you end up doing, whether engaging in human rights issues with village elders in Kenya or negotiating with heads of corporations in the European Union.

Our faculty are deeply involved in international legal issues essential to practicing law in a global economy. Professor Mark R. Patterson, co-director of the Fordham Center on European Law, has done work in Milan, Florence, and, most recently, Rome, at the Italian Competition Authority. “My hope,” he says, “is that deepening ties between Fordham and EU institutions will encourage our students to broaden their job and practice opportunities, particularly if they are interested in areas like antitrust that involve cross-border work.”

An expert in comparative corporate law, Professor Martin Gelter has traveled to former Soviet Georgia to help guide the country’s judges through the legal similarities and differences of various corporate structures. Why should the internal goings-on of corporations concern the rest of us? Because, Gelter says, with more and more U.S. workers betting their retirement on the stock market, all of our financial fates depend on the way corporations behave, and sometimes they don’t behave with the noblest of intentions. “When shareholder wealth maximization is the goal, it can come at the exclusion of other goals, like being more mindful of workers,” says Gelter, who has taught in the United States, Austria, Italy, and France. Of his students at Fordham Law, he says: “In my comparative corporate law class, a lot of them write research papers that are so impressive I encourage them to publish.”

Students also gain practical experience doing human rights work, if that’s their passion. In recent years, students have attended diplomatic meetings in Geneva and traveled to India to do interviews on the topic of sexual harassment. “So many of our graduates go out into the world and do amazing human rights work, becoming deeply engaged both domestically and internationally as social justice lawyers,” says Chi Mgbako, a clinical professor of law and director of the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic, who has worked with students on over 40 human rights clinical projects including women and HIV/AIDS and LGBT refugee rights. “The fiery spirit that the Leitner Center intensifies in our students continues to burn throughout their careers.”