Molly Land

Associate Professor of Law

Molly Land is Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School. Drawing on her human rights expertise and background as a litigator in the areas of intellectual property and technology, Professor Land’s scholarship focuses on access to knowledge and the intersection of intellectual property, information law, and human rights. Her current work explores the extent to which human rights law can provide a foundation for claims of access to the Internet as well as the opportunities and challenges for using new technologies to achieve human rights objectives. Professor Land’s articles have been published in the Yale, Harvard, and Michigan journals of international law, among other places. 

At New York Law School, Professor Land is affiliated with the Institute for Information Law and Policy, the Center for International Law, and the Justice Action Center. She is a member of the American Society of International Law and is currently serving on the Program Committee for the Society’s 106th Annual Meeting. She recently completed a two-year tenure as co-chair of the Junior International Law Scholars Association. Professor Land has advised several nonprofit and intergovernmental organizations on new developments in the area of human rights and technology, including the World Bank and Witness.

Prior to joining New York Law School, Professor Land was a Visiting Lecturer in Law and the Robert M. Cover / Allard K. Lowenstein Fellow in International Human Rights at Yale Law School. While there, she co-taught the course International Human Rights and the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. Professor Land has extensive experience in both litigation and fact-finding in the area of human rights. She has filed amicus briefs with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the Second and Ninth Circuits, among others, and has led fact-finding teams reporting on the intersection of new technologies and human rights, domestic violence against immigrant women in Minnesota, HIV/AIDS and women’s rights in Zambia, the lack of remedies for human rights violations in Kashmir, and the effect of zero-tolerance policies on the right to education in Connecticut.

Professor Land is a graduate of Yale Law School. While in law school, she was Student Director of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and an editor of the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. At graduation, she was awarded the Khosla Memorial Fund for Human Dignity Prize for advancing the values of human dignity in the international arena and the Raphael Lemkin Prize for the best student paper in international human rights. Professor Land clerked for the Honorable Denise Cote, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York. After her clerkship, she was named a Robert L. Bernstein Fellow in International Human Rights and worked as a human rights researcher for Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. Between 2003 and 2005, she litigated copyright, trademark, cybersquatting, and patent cases with Faegre & Benson LLP. Prior to law school, Professor Land was a Fulbright Scholar and an intern in the German Parliament in Bonn, Germany.