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This part of the site is for discussion, questions and answers, and the exchange of ideas about refugee law.
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Courses and Seminars
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.
Advanced Seminars
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.
- In Refugee Law Reform, students build on the comparative law research to devise a comprehensive analytical framework for resolution of the problem under consideration. They prepare a collectively authored discussion paper outlining all relevant considerations, which is shared with a select group of leading international refugee law scholars from 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.
For more information, please visit the the website of University of Michigan Law School.
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