Skills & Innovation

Faculty: Isabella Alexander-Nathani and Daniel Vannucchi

This class is a special hybrid offering between UCLA School of Law and the School of Theater, Film and Television. Only 12 students from each program will be able to participate, for a total class size of 24 students. 

Students will form small teams to develop human rights advocacy strategies for leading human rights organizations and then work with film students in their development of multimedia assets to support the strategies. Each team will partner and work alongside a leading human rights organization (eg. Human Rights Watch) who will provide the team with a thematic focus and feedback. Teams will be provided a project budget and present their work at a showcase at the end of the semester. 

The course will consist of seminars, workshops, readings and screenings. Seminars will focus on key principles of advocacy in human rights, and the often overlooked intersection between human rights, law, and storytelling – including issues in impact filmmaking, and dilemmas filmmakers face. The workshops will put these principles into practice by asking students to conduct independent research and analysis to support the development of the partner organizations’ advocacy strategies and multimedia outputs. Readings and screenings will focus on analyzing past advocacy campaigns and films, and students will be afforded the chance to engage with some of the legal experts and filmmakers being studied. 

Faculty: Jess Peake

A course which prepares students for cutting-edge work, this seminar introduces the concepts and practices underlying digital open-source investigations (OSINT). From legal requirements to practical skills, the purpose and history of these investigations, ethical considerations, identifying trauma responses when investigating atrocity crimes, and the history of OSINT in human rights organizations and international courts, students gain valuable skills for any legal career.

Faculty: Femke Bartels, Kate Mackintosh & Jess Peake

This two-week intensive is something of a maverick in the UCLA Law course catalog. The Human Rights Challenge has students apply human-centered design, systems-thinking, network building and other techniques from outside traditional legal pedagogy to reimagine what the law can do — generating innovative legal solutions to a real-world human rights challenge selected for each year’s class.