World Class Alumni Newsletter

Via the HLS Graduate Program
Excerpted from the February 2024 World Class Alumni Newsletter

The recently established ILS Postgraduate Fellowship supports recent HLS graduates working at international/supranational courts. “The demand for fellowships to make this kind of work possible far exceeds the number we are able to provide,” observes HLS Director of International Legal Studies, Sara Zucker. “We would love to be able to offer more fellowships, and to extend the scope of these fellowships to support graduates working with non-profit organizations abroad and with inter-governmental organizations.”

Anna Crowe LL.M. ’12, the Associate Director of the law school’s International Human Rights Clinic, agrees. “There are so many LL.M.s. who are interested in international work and could do really well in postgraduate fellowships. Undoubtedly, we need more fellowships and more funding.”

As an LL.M. student, Anna took advantage of clinical opportunities to the maximum extent possible, working in the International Human Rights Clinic for two semesters and undertaking an independent clinical placement during Winter term. “Through my clinical work at HLS, I gained confidence that this was work that I could do, and that this was a field I could do well in.” She applied for the Henigson Fellowship and credits her success in part to the extensive help and support she received from Judy Murciano in OPIA and Bonnie Docherty in the Clinic. 

Anna spent her fellowship year working with the International Crisis Group in Colombia on a substantial report addressing the possibilities of transitional justice for members of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) within the context of the country’s political and legal system. Her work involved meeting with policy makers and representatives of victims’ organizations. “It really gave me that entry into the human rights space that I would never have had without the funding that the fellowship provided,” she reflects.

The following year, she was able to secure a permanent position at Privacy International, an NGO based in London. “It was a really interesting time to be working in this field, because the Snowden revelations had just happened, and suddenly there was a clamor to understand the human rights implications of communications surveillance and to talk more about that issue in human rights spaces in the UN.”

In 2014, Anna came back to HLS to join the Clinic. “I routinely encounter LL.M.s who could benefit from postgraduate fellowships,” she says. “In some fields, there are really no entry-level positions, so a fellowship provides a critical stepping stone into that space.”