The Jacob Burns Institute for Advanced Legal Studies was established in 1988 through an extraordinarily generous gift from Jacob Burns, the former Chair of Cardozo’s Board of Overseers.

Jacob Burns created the Institute to enhance the intellectual life of the law school and to enhance Cardozo’s international reputation for scholarly debate and research. These undertakings have ranged from blockbuster international conferences, to individual lectures, to support for research and publication. For more than 30 years, the Burns Institute has served as an indispensable source of support for a variety of academic programs on the critical legal issues of the day.

The mission of the Jacob Burns Institute for Advanced Legal Studies is to make the Cardozo School of Law a center for advanced legal studies, renowned throughout the country and the world for its effort to integrate into the study of law the insights offered by the social sciences and the humanities.

The Institute sponsors scholarship, workshops, lectures, and conferences that bring together the world’s most eminent scholars, both in law and in other disciplines, to study critical legal issues in an effort that recognizes that the final cause of law is the welfare of society. The Jacob Burns Institute for Advanced Legal Studies is administered by a rotating faculty committee. The primary responsibilities of the committee are to organize the faculty workshop series and moderate the sessions, and to review and approve proposals for conferences and other requests for support from the Burns Institute.