A dozen members of GW Law’s Immigration Law Association spent their spring break on the Arizona/Mexico border exploring immigration issues and performing pro bono work for a human rights nonprofit organization. Highlights of the week-long program included crossing the border fence into Nogales, Mexico, to talk with Mexicans about the impact of U.S. immigration laws on their lives; meeting with former immigrant detainees; talking with legal service providers about the challenges of representing those in immigrant detention; touring the border fence with Border Patrol agents; and attending a vigil for illegal immigrants who died or went missing in the desert.
law, antitrust, intellectual property, and international litigation and arbitration. Every year Donald Clarke, the David Weaver Research Professor of Law, has seen enrollment in his Chinese law classes grow with students from the U.S. and overseas. While many have solid backgrounds in the language and the region, he says, “they are surprised by the thing that is most different about the Chinese legal system. It is very deliberately designed not to be independent of political forces. Students then jump to the conclusion, therefore, that the law doesn’t matter. One has to know more than the written law.” Energy is perhaps the most rapidly evolving industry in the country, according to Lee Paddock, associate dean of environmental law studies. The Law School recognized this and more than five years ago began to expand its energy law program. “The number of students interested in energy law at GW has grown significantly over the past few years, and we are in a great position to provide them with a full range of classroom and practice opportunities,” he says. “We like to say that we work at the intersection of environment and energy. Every energy source has its environmental impacts. We want to graduate students interested in energy law who understand the environmental impacts of energy and environmental lawyers who understand the energy field.” Associate Dean Paddock wants his students to have a good understanding of energy issues both in the United States and in other countries. Toward that goal, he has forged a relationship with the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and Fundação Getulio Vargas, a university in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These relationships have allowed students from all three universities to compare how their countries address energy issues such as emissions trading, carbon capture and storage, deep-water drilling, and regulation of hydraulic fracturing. One aspect of the law that is truly not bound by borders is intellectual property. “Every pharmaceutical company, Google, and chip company has global strategies,” says John Whealan, associate dean for intellectual property law studies. “Money flows, and intellectual property flows. If you are a patent lawyer, you need to know something about international patent law as well.
Most technology companies manufacture and sell their products throughout the world. As a result, they need global IP protection.” For a world view of intellectual property, the Law School linked up with distinguished German institutions, such as the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, to establish the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center a decade ago. Munich is known as the center for European IP law, and one of the premier centers for European science and technology, Associate Dean Whealan says. Associate Dean Susan Karamanian is ever watchful of these legal trends, hiring adjunct faculty members when needed to fill a niche of growing interest. A case in point: Islamic finance. She helped recruit Ayman Khaleq, LLM ’94, who is a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP in Dubai. A few times a semester, he flies in from the Middle East to teach the course. “The growth of the faculty over the past decade or so has been the result of a focused effort to identify trends and areas of need and recruit the most highly qualified individuals,” Associate Dean Karamanian says. That attention to hiring just the right professors with the depth of international expertise and admitting students from around the world shows up in the multidimensional and vibrant discussions generated in the Law School’s classrooms. One of the most popular classrooms is the comparative constitutional law class taught by Professor David Fontana. The class is based on the discussion of constitutional issues from a comparative perspective, exploring U.S. constitutional law and the constitutional laws of other countries. The class examined abortion, for instance, and how Roe v. Wade compared with a German decision on abortion. And when a new constitutional issue crops up, as it did with gay marriage this past spring, the students turned their attention to the constitutional law of marriage around the world. “One of the best and worst things about a legal education is how constraining it is,” Professor Fontana says. “What I try to do in my class is to enable students to think outside of the box within those constraints, to think differently, to think creatively. This is about solving problems that come up in the law. The class also allows law students both domestic and foreign to dissect and discuss fundamental constitutional issues that arise in many countries around the world.”
winter 2014 | www.law.gwu.edu
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