Trump renominates Indian-American law professor to civil liberties board

US President Donald Trump has renominated a prominent Indian-American law professor and legal expert to an agency whose mission is to ensure the federal government's efforts to prevent terrorism are balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties.

The nomination of Aditya Bamzai of Virginia, to be reappointed a Member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board for a term expiring January 29, 2026, was sent to the US Senate.

In August 2018, Trump had nominated Bamzai, a professor at University of Virginia's School of Law, to be a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board for a six-year term expiring January 2020.

The Board is an independent agency within the Executive Branch established by the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. The Board's mission is to ensure that the federal government's efforts to prevent terrorism are balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties.

According to his profile on the agency's website, Bamzai also teaches and writes about civil procedure, administrative law, federal courts, national security law and computer crime.

He joined the University of Virginia School of Law's faculty as an associate professor in June 2016 and his work has been published or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, the George Washington University Law Review and the Missouri Law Review, among other journals.

He has argued cases relating to the separation of powers and national security in the US Supreme Court, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, DC Circuit and other federal courts of appeals.

Before entering the academy, Bamzai served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel of the US 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, he was a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court and to Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

He is a graduate of Yale University and of the University of Chicago Law School, where he was the editor-in-chief of the law review.