''As A Lawyer You Can Choose To Do Simple Cases, But Not With Me, Criminal Cases For Imprisoned Policians Is Me'' Amal Clooney

 

Most celebrity humanitarians—including Bono, Oprah, and Angelina Jolie—were famous before they were advocates. Not so for Amal Clooney. She went from a respected international human-rights lawyer to one of the planet’s most recognizable faces when she married a certain Oscar-winning George in September 2014. 

While the elevated public profile hampers how well she can keep some facts private (like that she’s expecting twins), it has improved her ability to call attention to marginalized groups, one of the most essential aspects of her job. Thanks to Clooney, even tabloids on either side of the pond now report on the Yazidi women who have been kidnapped, raped, and enslaved at the hands of ISIL.

“I think human-rights lawyers for a long time were thought of kind of like the hippie aspect of lawyers,” said Sara Elizabeth Dill, the director of criminal justice standards and policy at the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C. Dill has been aiding those hit by President Trump’s travel ban. Clooney and others, in Dill’s opinion, have brought “a level of professionalism and accomplishment” to the role. Since Clooney “came on the scene,” international human-rights lawyer Hilary Stauffer, who works at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said interest in her own work has spiked “100 percent.”

Since 2010, Clooney has been employed by Britain’s Doughty Street Chambers, where she specializes in public international law, international criminal law, and human rights. Previously, she worked as a defense attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, where she helped to represent former Enron executives and other corporate clients.

Clooney is well known in her field for not only defending government leaders who’ve gone to prison but also for advocating on behalf of neglected and exploited groups. “If you are a lawyer and you want to take on easier cases, you can prosecute traffic violations or something. You’d have a very high rate of success, and you probably could sleep more easily at night. But that’s not what drives me. I want to work on cases that I feel the most passionate about,” she said in an interview with NBC in January 2016.

 Some of Clooney’s more contentious clients have included the dictatorial King of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa; Abdullah al Senussi, former intelligence chief to the late Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi; and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“There really is no average day,” said Juliet S. Sorensen, Harry R. Horrow professor of international Law at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, and an associate of the school’s Center for International Human Rights. An international human-rights lawyer could be anywhere on the globe on a given day.