A Canadian-born Muslim whose experiences of discrimination at the U.S. border moved him to take up a law career is poised to become the first judge of Arab descent on the federal trial court in the District of Columbia.
Amir H. Ali, who was born in Kingston, Ont., and won’t turn 40 till next year, was nominated this year by President Joe Biden to the District Court in D.C. The nomination needs to be confirmed by the Senate.
At his nomination hearing this month before the Senate Judiciary Committee, with his parents, wife, sister and several other family members in attendance, he recounted how his mother and father “emigrated from the desert in Egypt about 45 years ago to snow-filled Canada, in search of greater economic opportunity for the children they would have.”
He did not, however, describe his path to becoming a lawyer. Mr. Ali was a software engineer trained at the University of Waterloo when he left Canada for Silicon Valley. But as “an Arab in the post-9/11 world,” he said in an interview that he supplied as part of the package of materials before the committee, after visiting his family in Canada, he was inevitably held up for questioning by U.S. officials, sometimes for hours, “with others who looked like me.”
The experience puzzled him, he said.
“In the midst of what was blatant and widespread racial profiling, individual border agents were, for the most part, friendly and conversational – we’d chat about their families, the weather, and more. I became very interested in the notion that systems of law and discretion could lead otherwise good people to participate in something so disturbing.”
So he went to Harvard University for law, graduating in 2011. He clerked for a judge on a federal appeals court, and then came back to Canada where he clerked in 2012-13 for Supreme Court Justice Marshall Rothstein.
“Without a doubt one of the smartest law clerks I ever had,” Mr. Rothstein told The Globe and Mail. “A genuine first-class individual. He will be an outstanding judge.”
Mr. Ali could not be reached for comment.
From there, his rise to the nomination was swift. He spent four years at a big law firm in Washington, representing large companies in complex civil cases, regulatory matters and before appeal bodies. In 2017, he joined the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center in Washington, which represents “people who have been harmed by the criminal justice system,” its website says. By 2021, he was its executive director.
Overlapping, in 2019, he became director of Harvard’s Criminal Justice Appellate Clinic, supervising second- and third-year students in legal research and writing. He was also a board member and eventually, co-chair, of the Appellate Project, a Washington-based agency that seeks to empower law students of colour to thrive at appeal courts. (The interview where he describes his experiences of racial profiling at the U.S. border was done with the Appellate Project.) He was also a volunteer on Mr. Biden’s transition team, from October, 2020, to January, 2021.
In three civil rights cases since 2016, Mr. Ali presented arguments to the U.S. Supreme Court – and won each time. One case was about an unjustly accused postal worker and whether he had a right to sue police who pursued false criminal charges. The Supreme Court said he did.
“Mr. Ali is one of the most impactful civil rights litigators of his generation,” says Richard Albert, a Canadian who teaches law at the University of Texas at Austin. “Canada’s loss is America’s gain. Mr. Ali would have been an outstanding judge for Canadians.”
The website of the U.S. federal court system says judges need to be U.S. citizens or permanent residents who applied for citizenship soon after becoming eligible.
Judiciary Committee chair Senator Dick Durbin introduced him as the first Arab-American to be on the District Court in D.C., if confirmed.
Mr. Ali’s questionnaire posted by the judicial committee also mentions a dozen articles he wrote or co-wrote, mostly on a blog, but including an op-ed in The Guardian newspaper, opposing former president Donald Trump’s 2017 ban on entry from several Muslim-majority countries.
“In fact,” he wrote in a blog post in April, 2018, “I filed a brief in the Supreme Court detailing the President’s record of animus against Muslims, but the Court’s 9,000 word limit simply wasn’t enough to cover it all.”
At the nomination hearing, he was asked not about his views of the Muslim ban but about articles published in right-wing publications that said the MacArthur Justice Center called for defunding of the police and the dropping of charges against rioting members of Black Lives Matter.
“So I’m reading an article here talking about a spokesperson ... [who] said you want to lead a movement toward making police departments obsolete,” Senator Lindsey Graham said.
Mr. Ali said a colleague had sent him the article in advance of the hearing. He said he does not support defunding of the police nor is it MacArthur Center policy.
Senator Graham: “This organization has done some pretty radical things. … Did you know? And if you didn’t know, how could you not know?”
Senator Josh Hawley followed with similar questions. Mr. Ali joked that he wished to disclose that he is a 49ers football fan, and Mr. Hawley, who represents Missouri, home to the Kansas City Chiefs, shared a good-natured laugh with him.
Prof. Albert said the nomination hearings are “typically a formality” for District Court, a trial level comparable to that of the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench, or the Ontario Superior Court.
“I expect him to be confirmed. First, he doesn’t raise any of the red flags that one might look for. In fact, if there were red flags he wouldn’t be nominated to begin with. But two, the stakes are just not as high for a district court judge as they would for an appellate court judge, because that’s really where the Constitution becomes a battleground.”
Mr. Ali presented a varied set of endorsements to the committee, including prosecutors, Harvard colleagues who were members of the conservative Federalist Society (“our differences are transcended by our deep respect for him”) and nine Jewish leaders, including seven rabbis.
Sean Fine