Changes Name to Public Interest Law Institute.

Budapest, February 20, 2007 – PILI has embarked on the next phase of its development, separating formally from Columbia University to become a fully independent NGO. 

PILI will nonetheless continue to collaborate closely with Columbia Law School, maintaining the semester in residence at Columbia for its Public Interest Law Fellowship Program and involving Columbia faculty and students in selected PILI projects. PILI’s Executive Director will continue to teach at Columbia Law School each fall.  

As part of this process, PILI is adopting a new name: Public Interest Law Institute. The organization will continue to be known informally as PILI.

PILI’s mission remains to advance human rights around the world by stimulating public interest advocacy and developing the infrastructure to sustain it. PILI pursues its mission through five programs:

Legal Aid Reform – Improving state-supported legal-aid systems in order to enhance access to justice for socially vulnerable, poor and disadvantaged people.

Legal Education Reform – Fostering new generations of more effective and socially oriented lawyers by making legal education more practice-oriented, with an emphasis on clinical legal education.

Promoting Pro Bono – Institutionalizing pro bono practice by law firms and individual lawyers in order to leverage private sector resources for the public good.

NGO Advocacy – Building the advocacy capacity of civil society organizations.

Public Interest Law Fellowships – Assisting the professional development of future public interest leaders.

PILI was founded at Columbia University in 1997 as the Public Interest Law Initiative in Transitional Societies, with the support of the Ford Foundation. In 2002, PILI established a new headquarters in Budapest, Hungary. In addition to its Budapest headquarters, PILI maintains offices in New York and Moscow and a presence in Belgrade (Serbia), Beijing (China) and Samara (Russia).

The members of its Board of Directors are: Barbara Schatz (President), Michael Cheroutes, Kimberly Reed and Suzanne Turner. Edwin Rekosh is the Executive Director. The Trustees of PILI Foundation in Hungary are: Edwin Rekosh (Chair), Balazs Denes, Eva Hegedus, Tamas Kende and Krisztina Molnar.

More information and a wide variety of resources can be found on PILI’s website.