On the eve of his taking over the Office, President Obama names
NRI lawyer, Preeta D. Bansal as General
Counsel and senior Policy Advisor at the Office of Management and
Budget at the White House.
She has been Commissioner on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Election
Modernisation Task Force
Preeta Bansal: The 42-year-old lawyer is a partner at Skadden,
Arps, slate, Meagher & Fom in New York. Bansal was also part
of Bill Clinton’s White House and Justice Department in
1993-96. She was the first Indian American to head the US Commission
on International Religious Freedom.
Bansal became familiar with Obama's foreign-policy work through
her service on the U.S. Commission on International Religious
Freedom. She shared the candidate's emphasis on expanding legal
immigration, especially jobs-based immigration, although Obama
has also fought for placing a continued priority on family reunification.
Washington, July 01, 2004
Joe Khosla
A leading constitutional lawyer, NRI, Preeta D. Bansal, has been
elected as chair of the US Commission on International Religious
Freedom (USCIRF). On Thursday, Bansal became the first Indian
American to chair the independent and bipartisan federal agency
that advises the US administration and Congress. She has served
as the commissioner on the panel
Preeta Bansal is the former Solicitor General of the State of
New York, a position she held during the first three years of
Attorney General’s Eliot Spitzer’s administration. As
Solicitor General, she helped supervise a staff of six hundred
lawyers in the New York Department of Law, and directly oversaw
forty-five lawyers in the Solicitor General=s Office. The Solicitor
General’s office handles appeals for the State of New York
and its agencies in state and federal courts, writes Attorney
General opinions to state and municipal agencies on issues of
state law, and provides advice and counsel to State agencies.
During her tenure as Solicitor General, Ms. Bansal focused on
strengthening the credibility of the Attorney General’s office,
and the Solicitor General’s office in particular, with the
courts and public. She played a primary role in reviewing and
refining some substantive positions taken by the State in litigation
and in Attorney General opinions, and in implementing steps to
enhance the credibility and quality of written and oral advocacy
performed by the office. She engaged in extensive and active recruitment
of attorneys for the Attorney General’s office from various
sectors of the New York legal community, as well as regular dialogue
and relationship-building with the New York state and federal
court systems and judges. She initiated major steps to reorganize
and reinvigorate management, training and procedures within the
Solicitor General’s office and the Attorney General’s
office as a whole with the aim of making state government accountable,
transparent, efficient and more inclusive. She played a principal
role in helping the Attorney General to formulate and articulate
a vision for a proactive enforcement role for state attorneys
general nationwide in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “new
federalism” jurisprudence. She also argued cases in the United
States Supreme Court, the en banc Second Circuit, and the New
York State Court of Appeals on behalf of New York State. She has
been profiled in many national news and legal publications, including
The New York Times and the New York Law Journal.
Ms. Bansal is a magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of
Harvard-Radcliffe College, and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard
Law School, where she was Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law
Review. She served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens
of the United States Supreme Court (1990-1991) and to Chief Judge
James L. Oakes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit (1989-1990). Prior to her appointment as New York Solicitor
General, Ms. Bansal practiced First Amendment/media and appellate
law with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in New York City (1996-1999),
and previously with Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C. (1991-1993).
She served in the Clinton Administration (1993-1996) as Counselor
in the U.S. Justice Department and as Special Counsel in the Office
of the White House Counsel, where she focused on the President’s
judicial nominations, issues relating to youth violence and violence
against women, coordination of the United States’ agenda
for the United Nations Conference on Women (Beijing), and defense
of the First Lady’s Health Care Task Force. She also served
as Counselor to Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein (now Chancellor
of the New York City school system) in the U.S. Department of
Justice (Antitrust Division).
She has organised and sponsored numerous fact-finding missions
to Sudan, China, Egypt, and elsewhere and has testified regularly
before Congress about the governments of these countries. She
is the author of In the Lion's Den, a book on anti-Christian persecution
around the world, and writes frequently on the status of religious
freedom in the world.
Ms. Bansal has been a regular speaker and lecturer on constitutional
law issues in the United States and abroad, and has authored and
co-authored pieces published in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law
Journal, and Villanova Law Review, among other publications. She
has received awards and recognition from several local and national
legal associations and immigrant community groups, and has been
active in numerous community and social service activities. She
is a regular volunteer at community soup kitchens, has served
as a life skills mentor to inner New York City children, and serves
on the national boards of several nonprofit organizations. She
received her elementary and secondary education in Lincoln, Nebraska.
She was born in India and immigrated with her family to the American
Midwest at the age of three. She currently is on sabbatical and
teaching constitutional law as a Visiting Professor in her hometown
of Lincoln, Nebraska.
