Amal Clooney has named her former boss, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, as one of her greatest idols.
George Clooney’s human rights lawyer wife used to clerk for her back in 2001 when she was a student at NYU School of Law.
“When I was a junior lawyer she was incredible to watch in action in court, how she had so many cases in her head and firing questions at these lawyers standing before her,” she said.
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Clooney, 38, described Sotomayor as a “lovely” person, adding, “I was the most junior and irrelevant person in her chamber and she was very charming and very balanced.”
She made the remarks during her keynote speech at the Texas Conference for Women and added that her own mother, journalist Baria Alamuddin, has been another important role model and influence in her life.
Her mother is now a foreign editor of Pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat and Amal said that watching her balance her life and career while she was growing up was an example to learn from.
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“She cared about her career and cared about being independent but also had balance. She never lost her femininity. She believed the balance was important and that stuck with me.”
Amal was born in Beiruit, Lebanon, but during the Lebananse Civil War she and her family left for England when she was two. She studied law at Oxford Univeristy and then NYU before launching a career as a leading human rights lawyer.
She married George Clooney in 2014 and the globetrotting couple divide their time between homes in America, England and Italy.
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