Samiyyah R. Ali ’16 has been appointed as a deputy associate counsel in the Office of White House Counsel. Ali’s was one of 21 appointments to the office announced by President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris Jan. 11.
“Today’s brilliant and skilled appointees in the White House Counsel’s Office will be integral to building back better and restoring fair, lawful and ethical governance across all corners of the federal government,” said incoming White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain in a statement.
Ali served as a law clerk to Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018-19 before entering private practice with the litigation firm Wilkinson Stekloff in Washington, D.C. Before her Supreme Court clerkship, Ali was a law clerk for Judge Sri Srinivasan on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Judge Amul Thapar during his tenure on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
Before law school, Ali worked as a student affairs administrator at The Ohio State University. A native of Atlanta, she earned her bachelor’s degree at Duke University, where she was a Coca-Cola Scholar, and a master’s degree in higher education at Ohio State before earning her law degree at Vanderbilt in 2016. She was executive editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review in 2015-16.
