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GW Law School has established broad-based contacts and relationships in India and, as anyone working on the “India Project” at the Law School will tell you, it is only the beginning. Much of the work so far has been based on issues of intellectual property law and international law, two areas of national prominence at the Law School. These issues have arisen from the extraordinary growth in India’s expanding technological and financial sectors during the past decade. As India, the world’s largest democracy, has grappled with the changes called for in its domestic legal system as well as its international legal obligations, the India Project has launched a major comparative law program of engagement and study.


Raj Davé, LLM ’03, of Morrison & Foerster (right), Sasha Rao of Ropes & Gray (left), and other India Project delegation members meet a Supreme Court advocate outside of the Indian Supreme Court.

The project addresses questions including: How should the Indian legal system be best structured to enhance and support the innovative skills of its talented and highly educated citizens? What changes in the law and enforcement mechanisms does India need to make to meet its obligations under the Trips Treaty, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of the World Trade Organization?

In 2003, GW Law faculty and alumni launched the India Project to focus particularly on these issues and others related to IP in India. The work of the India Project and the network of relationships it has forged among Indian lawyers, judges, business leaders, and academics and their counterparts from the United States and other parts of the world has paved the way for the next step, a major interdisciplinary India Studies Center. Not one to rest on the Law School’s remarkable and unique success in India, Dean Frederick M. Lawrence says the Law School will continue to build ties in India through a new legal education center. The India Studies Center, to be launched shortly, will focus on a range of issues relevant to U.S.-Indian legal relations beyond IP, including labor law, government procurement, environmental law, corporate law, and constitutional law. In addition to strengthening GW Law’s reputation as a leader in international and comparative legal studies, the center is expected to contribute significantly to comparative scholarship of relevance to all aspects of the respective societies, ranging from business endeavors to individual rights to national security matters.


Dean Frederick M. Lawrence and Judge Barbara Rothstein, director of the U.S. Federal Judicial Center, outside the Indian Supreme Court.

Susan Karamanian

“The India Project already has enabled us to develop the most important comparative law project in the field of intellectual property among the United States, Europe, and India. We hope to build on this project and create an India Studies Center at the Law School that would become the focal point for comparative American-Indian law studies in the United States,” Lawrence says.

The center will be modeled after the Law School’s earlier successful work in India. For the past three years, faculty members, alumni, and distinguished members of the legal profession have collaborated with members of industry, such as the Confederation of Indian Industries, the U.S.-India Business Council, and officials from private corporations, to sponsor conferences, which thus far have been held in New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, and Hyderabad. The conferences have attracted scholars, judges, lawyers, business leaders, and government officials from around the world. The dialogue has fostered better understanding of the legal challenges India faces in light of rapid, widespread growth in technological and creative fields.

The India Project is in many ways the brainchild of Raj Davé, LLM ’03, a partner at Morrison & Foerster in Washington. Davé donated his $5,000 Finnegan Prize, awarded for excellence in IP writing, to the Law School. “I wanted to contribute to the Law School in a way that would also give back to India,” Davé says.


Randall Rader, JD ’78, a judge with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, presides over a moot court at the New Delhi session of the 2006 India Project Conference.

Professor Martin Adelman, co-director of the Law School’s IP Law Program, and Susan Karamanian, associate dean for international and comparative and legal studies, have led the project with Davé by organizing delegations, attracting the involvement of alumni and prominent legal experts, and welcoming Indian scholars and diplomats to the Law School. Adelman says the project’s work is happening at a critical time in Indian legal development.

“In India our delegation meets with government officials, educators, business leaders, and other legal scholars to teach and discuss intellectual property protection issues. These issues are of critical importance in India as modern India moves away from its socialist roots to a capitalist-based economy that is now one of the most important in the world,” Adelman says.

In addition to conferences, India Project initiatives include a training program on patent law for judges of the Indian High Courts at the National Judicial Academy in Bhopal and meetings with high-level Indian judges and policymakers such as Y.K. Sabharwal, chief justice of the Indian Supreme Court. Kapil Sibal, Indian minister of science and technology, visited GW Law in April.


Associate Dean Susan Karamanian greets a scientist accompanying the Confederation of Indian Industries delegation that visited the Law School in the spring. They are joined by Indian Minister of Science and Technology Kapil Sibal.

Claire Duggan

Mock trials and moot courts, often attracting large audiences and media coverage, are an element of the India Project conferences that put education into action, as audience members serve as juries. Response to these programs has been highly positive, says Randall Rader, JD ’78, a judge with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who has participated in the project since its inception.

“These demonstrations and programs have given the India Project and GW Law a name as one of the leading intellectual forces in the IP debates in India,” Rader says. “I am honored and privileged to be associated with such an important project with such potential to improve education and legal administration in one of the world’s most important emerging markets.”

Davé says those involved with the India Project have witnessed “direct, amazing changes” in Indian education and law during the past three years, and that the initiatives have strengthened U.S.-India relations. Plans are already under way for activities in Mumbai and Bangalore in January of 2007. “In the future, we hope to help India create more ‘manpower’ in the form of well-trained patent attorneys and stronger law schools that will educate IP lawyers. We also want to use education to strengthen enforcement of patent laws; enforcement is almost nonexistent now,” Davé says. “We also want to continue training at the judicial level.”


Judge Randall Rader, JD ’78, Moushami Joshi, LLM ’02, Raj Davé, LLM ’03, and Professor Martin Adelman during a break in the New Delhi session in 2006

Susan Karamanian

Building on this foundation, the Law School announced in Bangalore in January of 2006 an agreement with one of the world’s elite technology universities, the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur, to help develop the new Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law in Kharagpur, India. The Rajiv Gandhi law school will be the first intellectual property law school in India, and GW is the first American law school to co-sponsor an Indian law school. While offering the LLB degree (the JD equivalent), the Rajiv Gandhi law school will focus on preparing Indian lawyers to manage and take advantage of change, combining modern classroom technology and innovative teaching methods to provide lawyers with the skills to handle sophisticated legal matters pertaining to complex commercial transactions and cases. GW Law faculty members and administrative resources are helping the Rajiv Gandhi School in curriculum development, teaching methods, co-curricular activities, library materials, and the like. The relationship affords faculty members from both schools the opportunity to collaborate in all specialty areas, engage in comparative scholarship, and most importantly, to learn from each other.

The new India Studies Center will strengthen the role of GW Law in India and broaden its reach as more members of the GW community and those beyond it, whether in India, the United States, or other parts of the world, get involved in a variety of fields. This exciting, path-breaking work is just one way GW Law remains ahead of the curve and sets the standard for excellence in IP law and international and comparative law.