GW Law in India

My fourth trip to India in late February was in many ways the most rewarding to date. It’s both striking and gratifying to me that, in a world of electronic communication, so much still turns on personal relationships, built through face-to-face meetings. It’s the development of such relationships that has led to the expansion and deepening of our India program.

Moot court participants at the IP Summit.

First on our agenda was the 7th Annual Intellectual Property Summit in Delhi, during which we initialed a formal memorandum of understanding with the new National Law University, which was designed by the Indian Supreme Court to be a premier law school in India. While still in Delhi, we had very successful meetings with the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs and with the new Competition Commission of India (which is essentially their Federal Trade Commission). The Law School will organize events with both, but I’m particularly pleased that we’ll be exploring ways to involve our students in these planned collaborations. For example, we hope to find ways to connect our J.D. and LL.M. students with research agendas that will be relevant and valuable to the needs and interests of both institutions.

Our next visit was to Aligarh Muslim University, where we had a truly gratifying and instructive day. AMU is the preeminent Islamic University of South Asia, with a tradition that goes back to the 19th century. The university is now very much engaged in reaching out to the broader international community. Last year, GW was the first Law School from the United States to visit AMU and it was a pleasure to be returning. Aligarh is roughly 120 kilometers (75 miles) outside of Delhi, but the trip can take more than four hours by car. I found our journey to be a microcosm of what one experiences in India, a country of great contrasts. We left Delhi on a four-lane highway that ultimately became a two-lane, rutted, semi-paved road. We passed mostly cars, but also ox-drawn carts; some small cinder blocks houses, but also mud huts. Many, many cows on the road. Eventually we reached the remarkable AMU campus, which in total enrolls about 28,000 students, some of whom we had the great pleasure of meeting. We also enjoyed a celebration of our new collaboration agreement; among those in attendance was the AMU grad—an Indian ex-pat—who supports our scholarship for an AMU law graduate to pursue an LL.M. at GW.

From the tradition-bound Aligarh Muslim University we travelled to the modern law school of the India Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, about three hours outside of Kolkata. IIT-Kharagpur was the first campus of the extraordinary technology universities that have been critical to the development of modern India. GW Law helped start the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law at IIT-Kharagpur four years ago. During this visit, we held important meetings with the faculty and had a great session with the students. There was a good deal of enthusiasm for the student exchange that is taking place right now; about ten of our students are in residence at IIT-Kharagpur, taking classes and engaging with the resident student body.

The Law School established its India Project in 2004 with the goal of using legal education to help build bridges between the United States and India, the world’s largest democracies, which also share a common law tradition. This trip has been a very rewarding confirmation of all of our efforts in India. The range of relationships has strengthened and expanded. And in so many ways it is still just the beginning.