Seeking Excellence at the School of Law
From public health and racial justice to global human rights and technological innovation, Northeastern University School of Law’s Centers of Excellence leverage the power of law across disciplines to create positive change. They offer unique opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration among students, faculty, industry leaders, and community partners. Within each center, renowned faculty draw top students to Northeastern, contributing to the Schools of Law’s place as a leader in public interest law and experiential learning. Students, in turn, make a real impact working on co-ops and in clinics, where they not only represent underserved members of the community, but build networks that will help them pursue meaningful legal careers.
Your support of the School of Law uplifts our students, faculty, and public interest mission, empowering our people to address today’s most challenging societal and legal issues. We are delighted to share with you these recent highlights from each of our Centers of Excellence.
Center for Health Policy and Law
Center for Law, Equity and Race
Center for Law, Information and Creativity
Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration
Center for Global Law and Justice
Through the efforts and national reputation of our Center for Health Policy and Law (CHPL), the School of Law is ranked seventh nationally for healthcare law. Known for pioneering innovative solutions to global public health challenges and a focus on interdisciplinary teaching, research, and stakeholder engagement, CHPL advances law and policy reforms to strengthen population health and public health programs, reduce health disparities, and enhance access to affordable, high-quality health care.
One of CHPL’s flagship programs, Salus Populi, provides guidance, training, and tools to inform judges about how the social determinants of health, ranging from housing instability and socio-economic position to structural racism and access to health care, impact people who come before courts.
This past June, Salus Populi welcomed a new Program Director, School of Law alumna Jasmine Howard, L'16, who earned her dual Juris Doctor and Master of Public Health degrees through the School of Law’s partnership program with Tufts University. After practicing law for many years, Howard embraced her return to the School of Law as a unique opportunity to more directly impact judicial knowledge of public health prior to being in the court room. Within her new role, she hopes to give judges the necessary tools to understand drivers of health and address inequities in the law.
Learn More about the Dual JD/MPH Program
What about the future of Salus Populi under Howard’s leadership? She is looking forward to expanding the program’s reach in the coming months and beyond:
“We have a really packed schedule into the summer. We will be presenting to the National Association of Women Judges and National Association of Counsel for Children, virtually. We will also be traveling to Minnesota and North Dakota to present to judges. I am really excited to continue to grow our partnerships with judicial and legal organizations nationally.”
Northeastern’s Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) is a hub for interdisciplinary research and action on racial justice. Through collaborative networks of students, faculty, and public officials, CLEAR works to transform historical research and restorative justice techniques into concrete solutions for advancing racial equity and criminal justice reform.
In 2024, civil rights leader, University Distinguished Professor of Law, and CLEAR Faculty Co-Director Margaret Burnham and her team were selected by the City of Boston as the academic partner for its Task Force on Reparations. Under Professor Burnham’s guidance, the task force is researching the multigenerational impact of slavery on Black Bostonians—from public education to housing and economic development—with the goal of steering Boston’s reparation efforts to an equitable resolution.
Read More about CLEAR's Work on the Boston Reparations Task Force
Center/Program Headline
CLEAR faculty and researchers influence reparations efforts beyond Boston, as well. Within CLEAR, the nationally recognized Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) has launched a new federal reparations initiative that could reshape the national conversation surrounding racial justice and reparations.
As CRRJ expands its groundbreaking work of identifying and documenting cases of racial violence during the Jim Crow Era and of working with family members of those victims on reparative justice initiatives, the federal reparations project looks at what comes next. This project seeks federal support for those families victimized by racial violence in instances where the federal government failed to take action against lynching and other incidents of homicidal racial violence between 1885 and 1965.
With its national scope, this project is poised to strengthen and complement local reparations efforts across the country, offering a comprehensive framework for addressing historical injustices through both monetary compensation and broader restorative measures.
Center/Program Headline
Every year, law students work at the CRRJ Clinic, conducting investigations into CRRJ cases, assisting staff attorneys in managing its docket and archive, and supporting CRRJ's research and policy work. CLEAR also draws top students from around the country to participate in summer internships focused on its pioneering work. This summer, interns investigated close to 100 cases of racially motivated homicides, supported work on interdisciplinary projects and research into historical police killings, and conducted research for the federal reparations project.
Read More about Their Investigations
At the forefront of intellectual property law, the Center for Law, Information and Creativity (CLIC) attracts and empowers the next generation of legal innovators to shape a more equitable future at the intersection of technology, creativity, and social justice. CLIC’s interdisciplinary faculty and industry partnerships offer students unique experiential learning opportunities where they can put their knowledge into practice.
Associate Professor of Law David Simon, an expert on intellectual property, healthcare law, data, and liability, is serving as principal investigator on a joint Northeastern-Tufts Medical Center project to analyze data from tens of thousands of medical devices with the goal of identifying safety risks and developing legal tools to address them.
Most medical devices reach the market without a full review of safety. The current standard allows more devices to reach patients, but also presents a greater risk that patients will be injured by unsafe devices.
With grant funding from Arnold Ventures, the project establishes the Amy J. Reed Collaborative for Medical Device Safety and aims to improve the safety of medical devices that reach the market by identifying unsafe medical devices and working to mitigate their effects or remove them from the market through legal action and publicity. The project will also identify, evaluate, and target structural designs that enable unsafe devices to evade detection prior to injuring a patient.
“The most exciting aspect of this collaboration is all the things we won’t see—fewer injuries and malfunctions and less harm. While our actions target unsafe medical devices, we are excited about the prospect of helping people access safe and effective healthcare. To achieve this, we have assembled an elite team that is committed to both patient safety and quality innovation. We also have the opportunity to honor Dr. Amy J. Reed, whose experience with an improperly regulated medical device was fatal, by ensuring that future patients do not suffer the same consequences that she endured.”
– Professor Simon
Though the project is in its early stages, Professor Simon is looking for ways to include students in the work by hiring research assistants, possibly establishing funded co-op opportunities, and even developing a related class offering.
Bringing together experts in law, medicine, and medical device safety, the Amy J. Reed Collective solidifies relationships that will continue to grow, develops a self-sustaining medical-legal partnership to improve medical device safety, and creates new opportunities for innovative, evidence-based, public-interest-oriented research.
From the courtroom to the community, Northeastern's Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration (CPIAC) transforms today's passionate law students into tomorrow's champions of social justice, fortifying the School of Law's place at the forefront of public interest law education.
In February 2024, CPIAC’s Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Project (C2P Project) was awarded a $2.5 million Northeastern Impact Engine Grant. The Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline reflects the intertwined legal and social systems that lead youth, especially Black youth and other youth of color, to juvenile and adult incarceration. The interdisciplinary C2P Project brings together experts from Northeastern’s School of Law, College of Art, Media and Design, and College of Social Sciences and Humanities to develop a robust model for understanding and dismantling the structural systems that contribute to mass incarceration in Massachusetts.
Read More about the C2P Project
With this framework for data collection and analysis, the C2P Project seeks to empower advocates with evidence-based tools to shift from reactive safety policies to a proactive, public health-oriented approach, while also creating a model that other states can use to facilitate data collection, stakeholder collaboration, and scalable solutions.
The collaborative nature of the C2P Project, spanning multiple academic disciplines and community partnerships, offers students an invaluable learning opportunity and ensures that upcoming legal professionals develop a nuanced understanding of the complex factors driving mass incarceration.
Law students like Meghan Leong and Heather Atherton play a vital role in this research endeavor, gaining hands-on experience through pro bono opportunities and direct involvement in community lawyering practices.
Meghan Leong, L’25
As a former sixth grade teacher at a Title I school, Meghan was inspired by her former students and teaching experience to pursue a law degree that will enable her to prevent more youth from being pushed into the system and to educate more people on how to be developmentally appropriate, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed while working with youth. Educational continuity is one of the most crucial factors that keep youth out of the juvenile justice system, and Meghan witnessed how intersectional issues, such as homelessness, food insecurity, and lack of special education services, affected her students’ ability to focus on learning in school.
Her time as a research assistant on the C2P Project further informed her understanding and use of tools to fight the cradle-to-prison pipeline:
“I learned all about the public records request process and how to leverage it as a tool to collect data. Accessing this school-based arrest data will help researchers identify patterns of racial and systemic inequities in discipline practices and allow the C2P Project to propose data-driven solutions to policymakers and legislators as well as enable legal practitioners to engage in evidence-based advocacy. My hope is that filing these public records requests holds schools and law enforcement accountable for their exclusionary and often discriminatory practices, pushes for policy reform, and ultimately reduces the number of youth arrested.”
Heather Atherton, L’25
As an aspiring indigent defense lawyer, Heather hopes to practice law in a people-focused manner that will allow her to better serve her clients through an understanding of the circumstances and systems that led them to be facing incarceration. While her work in indigent defense may be primarily reactive, working on the C2P Project has helped her understand she will be a more effective advocate and achieve better outcomes for her clients when confronting the background forces in the long term.
As a research assistant on the C2P Project, Heather connected her experiences as a parent of a student in the Chicago Public School system with some of the core systems that perpetuate mass incarceration:
“I arrived at Northeastern Law hoping to bridge the gap in my knowledge between what I observed in predominantly low-income schools and the theoretical frameworks that seek to explain the inequalities and over-policing of our day-to-day lives. In performing research and public records requests for the C2P Project, I’ve learned a lot about the nuts and bolts of the system and how schools play an enormous and cooperative role in reinforcing the legal regimes that can remove opportunity from a child’s life before they are even old enough to tie their shoes.”
The Center for Global Law and Justice
In October 2024, the School of Law launched its newest Center of Excellence: the Center for Global Law and Justice (CGLJ). CGLJ, which now houses the renowned Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy, builds on the foundation of providing experiential education for students interested in promoting human rights and global justice through research and advocacy, and expands to offer opportunities to more students on a broader range of issues, including climate justice, international justice and accountability, human rights in the urban environment, and human rights in the United States.
At the heart of this initiative lies a dynamic hands-on program that catapults students onto the world stage. During their co-ops, rising legal advocates find themselves presenting research at international forums, such as the United Nations in Geneva, working shoulder-to-shoulder with seasoned human rights activists, and tackling real-world human rights and global justice issues. With dedicated student travel funds, co-op students can present their research to a wider audience and grow their networks, forging vital connections in the global human rights community that could shape their future careers.
In the fall of 2023, University Distinguished Professor of Law and CGLJ Co-Director Martha Davis brought two co-op students, Jennifer Loveland-Rose, L‘25, and Zain Walker, L’24, to Geneva, Switzerland, to participate in the UN Human Rights Committee’s review of US compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Law.
During their time in Geneva, Jennifer and Zain attended:
- the UN Human Rights Committee’s meeting with members of civil society;
- a consultation held by members of the US government for civil society organizations;
- the formal review sessions conducted by the UN Human Rights Committee; and
- meetings with special rapporteurs, independent experts charged by the UN to provide reports on human rights issues.
As part of their advocacy work in Geneva, Zain and Jennifer also distributed one-pagers on the right to water and the importance of a US National Human Rights Institute to stakeholders.
While gaining experience raising human rights issues with governmental bodies, this co-op provided an opportunity for close collaboration with faculty and legal experts, as Zain and Jennifer co-authored reports, post-review supplemental submissions, and shadow reports with Professor Davis for submission to UN Human Rights Committees. In September 2024, Professor Davis and Jennifer also participated in a first-of-its-kind meeting at the White House under the Biden Administration to discuss implementing human rights obligations in the United States, advocating alongside 45 civil society organizations and representatives from the vice president’s office and nine federal agencies.
Funding Innovative Research
The School of Law achieved an impressive 63.3% increase in research awards for faculty, staff, and students last year, from $1.93 million in 2022-2023 to $3.16 million in 2023-2024.
Growing Student Enrollment
2024 marks the fourth consecutive year of increased enrollment at the School of Law, with a 35.8% increase from fall 2020 to fall 2024.
Pursuing Experiential Education
With more than 1,100 co-op employers in 40 states and co-ops completed in 55 countries, law students can tailor their co-ops to their career interests, while building global professional networks.
With Gratitude
With your support of the School of Law, our Centers of Excellence continue to create mission-driven and experiential learning opportunities for students, fund transformative faculty research, and provide experiences that bring communities together to forge the next generation of global legal leaders and innovators. Thank you for your partnership in making these opportunities, and so much more, possible.
Contact Information
Lindsey Sadonis
Director of Development and Alumni/ae Relations
Northeastern University School of Law
617.373.5149
l.sadonis@northeastern.edu
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