This article explains the impact of India's engagement with the law of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on both the Indian state and on the WTO itself. In each case, it explains the role of Indian lawyers within the larger transnational context. In engaging with globalization and the WTO, India has transformed itself. The Indian state has moved toward a new developmental state model involving a stronger emphasis on trade, greater government transparency, and the development of public-private coordination mechanisms in which the government plays a steering role. The analysis shows that it has done so not as an autonomous policy choice, but rather in light of the global context in which the WTO and WTO law form an integral part. Reciprocally, the article displays the ways that India has built legal capacity to attempt to shape the construction, interpretation, and practice of the trade legal order. Indian private lawyers play increasing roles, although they remain on tap, not on top.Thi s article looks simultaneously at the Indian state in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and at the WTO in the context of India. In each case, we explain the new role of Indian lawyers. The normative stakes are significant: how does a large developing country become not only a rule taker but also a rule shaper in a transnational legal order (TLO), including to preserve its policy space. The theoretical stakes are equally important and are twofold: first, what is the impact of the trade legal order on the Indian state; and second, how autonomous is the WTO, including from Indian influence?First, unlike those who contend that the world is moving toward a postnational order where the state has been weakened (Strange 1996), we show that the enmeshment of India in Please direct all correspondence to Gregory Shaffer,