UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic

The UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic is a student litigation and advocacy project at American University's Washington College of Law.

UNROW's story began in 2000 when five Texas trial lawyers - Walter Umphrey, Harold Nix, Wayne Reaud, John O'Quinn, and John Eddie Williams (UNROW) - made gifts totaling $2 million to Washington College of Law. Over the past 10 years, that gift has supported student participation in human rights litigation through participation in the UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic.

Founded by WCL Emeritus Professor Michael Tigar, UNROW propounds a philosophy focused on providing great autonomy to WCL's student attorneys in proposing and preparing new cases, determining litigation strategy, drafting motions, arguing in court, and traveling internationally, if necessary, to support their clients and cases. The UNROW Clinic has exceptional experience with federal court and international litigation that involves multiple plaintiffs and factual complexities.

Although a WCL program, the UNROW clinic is administratively distinct from the other WCL clinics. It employs its own academic framework, admissions process, and other practices.

Famous quotes containing the words human, rights and/or impact:

    Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.
    Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)

    Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable.
    Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)

    As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.
    Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)