The agreements bring new academic and clinical opportunities for KU Law faculty and students. For students, KU Law is developing an internship program with the Director General of Foreign Trade in Mumbai and the Mumbai Export Promotion Councils. The partnerships also build KU’s web of international legal contacts, a valuable networking tool for students and alumni. “We look forward to welcoming law students from these institutions,” Dean Mazza said. “They will bring a welcome perspective to the classroom. We hope these agreements will open up opportunities for KU students to practice in India.” Already, faculty and students are engaging with India. Professor Jean Phillips is the first nonIndian appointed to the all-India Advisory Council of the Institute of Clinical Legal Education and Research. She will work — Professor Raj Bhala with top-ranking Indian judges, lawyers and academics to shape clinical legal education in India. Professor Elizabeth Kronk Warner is collaborating with prospective Muslim female lawyers and activists to provide contributions for an upcoming journal symposium. Dean Mazza serves on the advisory board of the first tax law LL.M. program in Asia, established by partner Jindal Global Law School. Two second-year law students, Madeline Heeren and Aqmar Rahman, will intern this summer in New Delhi at one of the largest law firms in India. In addition to brokering the agreements, Bhala gave 18 lectures during his tour. Topics ranged from international trade law to women’s issues in Islamic Law. Bhala also met with WTO negotiators from Bhutan, toured the High Courts of Mumbai and Delhi, visited a factory engaged in international trade and saw the museums and memorials of Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Bhala’s visit came just before Indian elections, during which all 543 seats in the Indian Parliament and the office of Prime Minister are up for grabs. An unprecedented 814 million people are expected to vote. “India is the world’s largest free market democracy, and soon to be the world’s most populous nation,” Bhala said, noting its strategic importance to KU’s International and Comparative Law Program. “The Indian market is opening up. The barriers to entry for Jayhawk lawyers are coming down. Our partnerships ensure that KU Law is a player in global legal markets.”
“The Indian market is opening up. The barriers to entry for Jayhawk lawyers are coming down.”
Second-year law students Aqmar Rahman and Madeline Heeren started the nonprofit aid organization United Across Borders after witnessing poverty in Bangladesh.
After summer in Dhaka, students start nonprofit to aid world’s poor
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qmar Rahman and Madeline Heeren dream of a day when the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh, are filled with crimson and blue. The two law students are the founders of the nonprofit organization United Across Borders with a simple yet ambitious goal — to provide T-shirts and blankets to the poor around the world with the help of fellow Jayhawks. “Our mission is to provide people with certain things that are basic necessities that we don’t really think about. We buy T-shirts and we throw them away, and we want to repurpose that for a good cause for the people that really need it,” Rahman said.
SLUMS OF DHAKA Having spent the past 13 years in BANGLADESH Lawrence, Rahman, second-year law student, considers himself a “townie” and a die-hard Jayhawk. However, his roots lie halfway across the world in Dhaka. Dhaka is the crowded capital of Bangladesh, where more than 30 percent of its population lives in poverty according to World Bank. It’s where the highly publicized factory collapse occurred last April, with casualties of more than 1,100 people. After hearing about the factory collapse last spring, Rahman jumped at the chance to go back to Dhaka as a summer intern at a local law firm, which handled the case for the factory collapse. Madeline Heeren, also a secondyear law student from Lenexa, joined Rahman. “We wanted to go and see what really happened, what the factories are really like, if they are as bad as the news made them out to be,” Heeren said. In Dhaka, they couldn’t help but notice the irony. In the second-largest garment and textile manufacturer in the
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