Academic Curriculum

The foundation course of the Program is International Refugee Law, offered each fall to students who have completed (or who are enrolled in) the co-requisite course in Transnational Law. This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the international legal regime for the protection of involuntary migrants. The essential premise of the course is that refugee law should be understood as a mode of human rights protection, the viability of which requires striking a balance between the needs of the victims of human rights abuse and the legitimate aspirations of the countries to which they flee. The course introduces students to the legal definition of a refugee, refugee rights, and the institutional structures through which protection is accomplished. It defines and applies contemporary legal standards, and situates United States asylum law within its international and comparative legal context.

Students who have completed International Refugee Law are eligible to enroll in the advanced seminar offerings of the Program. This series of three interrelated seminars immerses students in major contemporary debates regarding the implementation of international refugee law standards in domestic asylum systems, and encourages the critical appraisal of both state practice and international efforts to coordinate protection across states.

• In Comparative Asylum Law, members of the seminar take individual responsibility to research and analyze the caselaw of leading asylum countries on a key subject of contemporary concern, and collectively to define both the legality and policy implications of prevailing state practice.
  
  
• Protection of Human Rights in International Law provides an overview of the contemporary international human rights regime, including substantive norms and key modes of implementation. We begin by discussing the contours of various rights and ongoing debates over cultural relativity of rights. We then turn in detail to the various processes for the protection of human rights, including actions by individual states and NGOs, United Nations bodies, and regional human rights courts. The course also addresses several compelling contemporary issues, including U.S. ratification of human rights treaties.
  
  
• Refugee Rights Workshop is an advanced seminar that introduces students to the human rights set by the UN Refugee Convention, standards of treatment which bind all state parties to the treaty (including the United States). Among the topics considered are the duty not to return refugees to places where they risk being persecuted (non-refoulement), the right to freedom from arbitrary detention, the right to work, and the right to access social welfare. Linking refugee-specific standards to more general norms of international human rights law, the Workshop grapples with a series of practical case studies and seeks to devise legal strategies for effective challenges to the denial of refugee rights around the world.
  
  
• In the Colloquium on Challenges in International Refugee Law, the seminar receives and responds to the critiques of the proposed analytical framework from our external scholar collaborators, and then joins with that group for a weekend of intensive debate in Ann Arbor. Upon conclusion of the Colloquium, the students draft Michigan Guidelines on the subject of the Colloquium for the approval of the external collaborators, which are then published for reference by the broader academic and legal communities.