Trump Nominates Indian American Professor to Privacy and Civil Liberties Agency

By Little India Desk | August 9, 2018

India American law professor Aditya Bamzai will be nominated as a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) by U.S. President Donald Trump, the White House announced on Aug. 7. The board is an independent agency that reviews development and implementation of anti-terrorism laws, regulations and policies, along with protection of privacy and civil liberties.

If confirmed, Bamzai, an Associate Professor of Law at University of Virginia’s School of Law, would serve on the board until Jan. 29, 2020, when its six-year term expires.

“Aditya Bamzai of Virginia, to be a Member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board for the remainder of a six-year term expiring January 29, 2020,” the White House said in a statement while announcing Trump’s intent.

The news of the nomination was tweeted by the University of Virginia’s School of Law, and further shared by Bamzai on his personal Twitter handle. 

Prof. @adityabamzai will be nominated to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent, bipartisan agency established after Sept. 11. https://t.co/XkQUwjGkWt pic.twitter.com/eGG67kHdlo

— UVA Law School (@UVALaw) August 8, 2018

The PCLOB is an independent, bipartisan agency within the executive branch established at recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act, and signed into law in August 2007. It consists of four part-time members and a full-time chairman. The board is authorized to review that the U.S. government’s actions to protect the nation from terrorism are balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties, and to ensure that liberty concerns are appropriately considered in the development and implementation of laws and policies related to national security.

Bamzai will remain a faculty member at the Law School, where he teaches and writes about civil procedure, administrative law, federal courts, national security law and computer crime. He joined the university as an associate professor in June 2016. He has also been the editor-in-chief of the law review at the school.

His work has been published in journals such as Yale Law Journal,Missouri Law Review, among others.

Before entering the academic profession, Bamzai served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as an appellate attorney in both private practice and for the National Security Division of the Department of Justice.

Earlier in his career, after earning his Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from the University of Chicago Law School and B.A. from Yale University, Bamzai worked as a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

He has argued cases related to the separation of powers and national security in the U.S. Supreme Court, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, D.C. Circuit and other federal courts of appeals.