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H. Rajan Sharma is a founder and principal of the Firm and practices in the areas of complex commercial litigation, business law and international law. Before founding the Firm, Mr. Sharma was an attorney with the Park Avenue law Firm of Goodkind Labaton Rudoff & Sucharow LLP.
Mr. Sharma is presently lead counsel in Sahu et al. v. Union Carbide Corp., a major federal litigation arising out of the environmental consequences of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster and has represented the disaster victims in U.S. federal courts from 1999 to present. He has also served as litigation counsel for plaintiffs in Bodner er al. v. Banque Paribas et al., a major Holocaust-era litigation against a dozen French and British banks for illegal wartime confiscation of assets, which was the only such litigation to result in a favorable judicial decision on the merits. He was an attorney and counsel of record for many plaintiffs, In re German & Austrian Holocaust Litig., where he helped to negotiate a landmark international settlement involving multilateral Executive Agreements between the governments of France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland that resolved Holocaust-era litigation claims in U.S. courts by creating a $5.2 billion (U.S.) fund for Holocaust survivors. He is presently counsel for a certified class of more than three thousand plaintiffs in international litigation involving a sovereign debt offering, Poddar et al. v. State Bank of India.
His work on behalf of Bhopal survivors has been the subject of a profile in The American Lawyer magazine and a documentary film, entitled Litigating Disaster, by Tamouz Media, Inc. and Pointe du Jour Productions International. Mr. Sharma was a visiting Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law where he taught a seminar on International Law & Holocaust-Era Litigation in U.S. Courts. He has been published extensively on the subject of international law, human rights and dispute resolution in both professional and non-professional publications, including by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague in a collection of The Peace Palace Papers.
Professional appearances and interviews in television, print and radio on ABC News, CNN, History Channel, Democracy Now!, Voice of America, NPR Public Radio, New Scientist, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Frontline magazine, Asian Outlook, PBS, Indian Express, and The Statesman. Mr. Sharma is a sought-after speaker and lecturer on the field of international law and has been an invited guest speaker on international litigation and human rights law at Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, New York University, Bard College, Brown University, University of Indiana, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston College, University of Wyoming School of Law and New England School of Law.
Mr. Sharma obtained his law degree from American University School of Law in Washington D.C. and studied European Community Law at the University of Paris at the Sorbonne. He is admitted to the bar in the State of New York, the Southern District of New York and has perfected several appeals to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.