Your New Best Friends: Human Rights Research Guides

Now that the school year is underway, are you facing a thorny human rights law research project?  Or if you’re a professor, have you assigned a thorny research project to your students?

Skilled librarians at many of the major law schools offer easy-to-use human rights research guides to set you, or your student, on the way to a successful research result.  Here’s a rundown of a few of them, which could be included in syllabi or shared with students who are working with this material and need a hand to get started.

Not surprisingly, law schools with the most focus on human rights and international law typically offer the most extensive research guides.  Check out, for example, Columbia Law School, NYU School of Law and Harvard Law School.

For particular research angles, however, other law schools’s resources may be more useful.  For example, Georgetown Law School offers a human rights research guide that emphasizes the rights of women, reflecting Georgetown’s longstanding women’s human rights clinic.   With a general focus on public interest law, Northeastern Law School‘s guide provides an overview and links to country reports and NGOs working in the UN system. Arizona State School of Law has a research guide focused on human trafficking.

In short, there’s no need to rely on the blunt instruments of google searches and Wikipedia sites.  Knowledgeable professionals across the country have already done the legwork to get you started with your human rights research, whether you’re engaged in general research or addressing a targeted topic.