Faculty

Shruti Rana joined the faculty in 2007 as an Assistant Professor of Law and was promoted to Associate Professor of Law in 2010. Her teaching interests include International and Comparative Business Law, Contracts, Antitrust, Business Organizations, Securities Regulation, Banking Law, Immigration Law, Administrative Law, and Legal Analysis and Writing (LA&W). In December of 2008 and 2009, Professor Rana was a Visiting Professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, China.

Professor Rana’s research focuses on International and Comparative Business and Commercial law, Immigration Law, the Law of Philanthropy, International Women’s Rights Law, and issues related to the intersection of Business, Law, and Technology. She has also been extensively involved in policy and advocacy efforts in the areas of gender equity, welfare reform, and immigration law.

In the spring of 2010, Professor Rana helped launch the law school's new International and Comparative Law Clinic. This initiative aims to help students develop the cross-cultural competencies they will need to practice law in today's global arena. Students in the clinic have worked on a variety of projects around the world including in China, Mexico, and Namibia. Professor Rana co-supervised the Clinic's China project, which focuses on analyzing the developing legal framework in China for microcredit lending to Chinese rural citizens.

Prior to joining the University of Maryland, Professor Rana was a Social Affairs Officer at the United Nations, where she worked for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women during the Committee's 38th and 39th sessions. Before that, she was in private practice, focusing primarily on commercial and administrative law. She has worked for Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, D.C., and Quinn Emanuel LLP and Bingham McCutchen LLP in San Francisco, CA. She also clerked for the Hon. James R. Browning at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Professor Rana graduated from the University of California, Berkeley (with University and Departmental Honors), where she was a Regents' Scholar (“the most prestigious scholarship awarded by the University of California, Berkeley, to entering undergraduates”). She then earned an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics (graduating with Distinction and a mark of Distinction on her graduate thesis on Gender-Based Asylum Reform). She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was named a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and an AAUW Selected Professions Fellow,and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law. She was also a judicial extern to the Hon. Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Some of Professor Rana's publications include:

• Philanthropic Innovation and Creative Capitalism: A Historical and Comparative Perspective on Social Entrepreneurship, 64 Alabama Law Review (forthcoming 2013).
• China’s Copyright Reforms: A Comparative Perspective, 53 Santa Clara Law Review (forthcoming 2013) (with Garland Rowland).
• Taxation and Incentives in the Business Enterprise, IN ENTERPRISE LAW: CONTRACTS, MARKETS, AND LAWS IN THE U.S. AND JAPAN (Zenichi Shishido ed., forthcoming 2013) (with David Gamage).
• Chevron Without the Courts? The Supreme Court's Recent Chevron Jurisprudence Through an Immigration Lens, 26 Georgetown Immigration Law Journal (Winter 2012).
• The Emergence of the New Chinese Banking System: Implications for Global Politics and the Future of Financial Reform, 27 Maryland Journal of International Law 215 (2012).
• "Streamlining" the Rule of Law: How the Department of Justice is Undermining Judicial Review of Agency Action, 2009 University of Illinois Law Review 829 (2009), reprinted in 30 Immigration & Nationality Law Review 715 (2009) and cited in Immigration & Refugee Law and Policy (Stephen H. Legomsky and Cristina M. Rodriguez, eds. 5th ed. New York, Foundation Press, 2009).
• Touched by Greatness, 73 Montana Law Review 21 (2012).
• From Making Money Without Doing Evil to Doing Good Without Handouts: The Google.org Experiment in Philanthropy, 3 Journal of Business & Technology Law 87 (2008).
• Fulfilling Technology's Promise: Enforcing the Rights of Women Caught in the Global High-Tech Underclass, 15 Berkeley Women's Law Journal. 272 (2000), reprinted in Women, Science & Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies (Mary Wyer et al. eds., 2d ed. 2008).

Some of Professor Rana's recent presentations and commentary include:

• Presentation on New Developments in Chinese Banking Law at a Festschrift Conference in Honor of Professor John O. Haley, University of Washington, School of Law, October 19, 2012. View Poster »
• Lecture, Microcredit: Money, Morality, and Myth, Comparative Corporate Governance Distinguished Lecture Series, Fordham Corporate Law Center, Fordham Law School, New York City, April 26, 2012. View Poster »
• Presentation, The Development of the New Chinese Banking System: Domestic Modernization or Global Financial Manipulation?, American Society of Comparative Law, New Perspectives on Comparative Law Conference, (paper selected form a call-for-papers), George Washington Law School, Washington, DC, April 20, 2012.
• Presentation, The New State Capitalism: Will China’s Evolving Financial System Serve as an Example for Reforms in the Western World?, University of North Carolina Law School, Symposium on “Anticipating Dissension: When Legal Frameworks, U.S. Commerce and Foreign Markets Intersect,” Chapel Hill, NC, January 24-25, 2012. Presentation profiled by the North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation.
• Presentation, Introduction to Microcredit, Tibetan Social Business Conference, Dartsedo, Sichuan, China, July 17, 2010 (conference funded by the Ford Foundation)