A group of Ukrainian lawyers will study at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law this upcoming academic year through a new scholarship program aimed at supporting Ukraine as Russia’s war in the country rages on.
Students will earn an LL.M., a master’s degree in law, after completing the one-year program, which is part of the school’s larger initiative responding to the war called the Ukrainian Legal Assistance Project.
“When the war broke out in late February, I said, ‘We have to do something.’ This is a moment where international law is important,” said project founder Charles Kotuby, a professor of practice at the law school and executive director of its Center for International Legal Education. “[International lawyers] are the ones who are going to be there protecting the rule of law in Ukraine.”
Beyond Pittsburgh, the University of Florida Levin College of Law and University of Miami School of Law also launched new scholarship programs for Ukrainian lawyers to pursue LL.M.s on their campuses during the 2022-2023 academic year.
At Pitt, the law school has dedicated nearly half a million dollars to the project to provide students financial aid, Mr. Kotuby said. The lawyers from Ukraine will have their tuition paid for entirely, and many will also receive funds covering housing and other living expenses.
“We’re going to start seeking the help of the local law firm community in helping fund this for us,” Mr. Kotuby said. “We’ve had a number of Ukrainians, some with their families, who are going to be generously housed for free by people in Pittsburgh, which is just absolutely wonderful to see.”
He said he hopes at least half a dozen Ukrainians admitted to the program, if not more, will arrive on Pitt’s campus this fall — contingent on how many succeed in acquiring student visas.
On top of their coursework, students in the program will do pro bono work at law firms and nongovernment organizations to aid war-torn Ukraine, per Mr. Kotuby. He said those assignments may include documenting war crimes, helping prosecute human rights violations and other international legal claims, writing academic scholarship and penning op-eds.
Mr. Kotuby said Pitt Law has a history of training and financially supporting budding lawyers from embattled countries to become leaders upon their return home. In the aftermath of the Kosovo War, he said the law school recruited students from the country in the early 2000s through a similar program, awarding scholarships to allow them to “get educated and go back and help lead their country to prosperity.”
One of the program’s graduates, Vjosa Osmani, now serves as Kosovo’s president.
“That’s the sort of long-term thinking that we’re doing here and that we have been doing for, frankly, decades,” Mr. Kotuby said.
More recently, he said, the school has also started funding young lawyers to come from Afghanistan, where the Taliban recaptured control of the country last year. They will be joining Pitt’s LL.M. program in the fall alongside their Ukrainian peers.
When Anna Vnukova, an intellectual property lawyer from Kyiv, learned she had been accepted into the tuition-free program with housing costs also covered, she said she could do nothing else but process the news for hours. The university’s offer, she said, “changed my future.”
“I was really shocked,” Ms. Vnukova, 27, said. “It was marvelous. Absolutely.”
Days after the war’s onset, Ms. Vnukova fled by herself to Kraków, Poland, where she spent weeks sleeping on the floor of someone’s home. She said she learned about the program in Pittsburgh from scienceforukraine.eu, a website geared toward helping scholars and students impacted by the war. Now, she’s working in Germany and getting ready for her trip to the United States in August.
Ms. Vnukova said she hopes it will be safe enough to return to Ukraine following her graduation from Pitt Law next year. Ultimately, she wishes to use her knowledge in intellectual property and international law to help postwar rebuilding efforts in Ukraine.
