Clooney studied at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she received an Exhibition and the Shrigley Award. Clooney received the Jack J. Katz Memorial Award for excellence in entertainment law.
Clooney was chosen as Barbara Walters' Most Fascinating Person of 2015. At the 2014 British Fashion Awards, Clooney was shortlisted for Best British Style alongside David Beckham, Kate Moss, Keira Knightley and Emma Watson.
Clooney is part of the legal team representing Louis Olivier Bancoult and Chagos islanders on their claim that they had been forced off their island, Diego Garcia, in 1971 by the UK government to make way for a U.S. military base.
Amal Alamuddin was born in Beirut, Lebanon. However, during the 1980s Lebanese Civil War, the Alamuddin family left Lebanon and settled in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. She was two years old at the time. Her Father, Ramzi Alam Uddin, from a Lebanese Druze family from Baakline (a village in the Chouf district), received his MBA degree at the American University of Beirut and was the owner of COMET travel agency, returned to Lebanon in 1991. Her mother, Bariaa Miknass, from a family of Sunni Muslims from Tripoli in Northern Lebanon, is a foreign Editor of the Pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat and a founder of the public relations company International Communication Experts, which is part of a larger company that specializes in Celebrity guest bookings, publicity photography, and event promotion.
Clooney attended Dr Challoner's High School, a girls' grammar school located in Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire. She then studied at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she received an Exhibition and the Shrigley Award. In 2000, Clooney graduated with a BA degree in Jurisprudence (Oxford's equivalent to the LLB) from St Hugh's College, Oxford.
The following year, in 2001, she entered New York University School of Law to study for the LLM degree. She received the Jack J. Katz Memorial Award for excellence in entertainment law. For one semester while at NYU, she worked in the office of Sonia Sotomayor, then a judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Amal is qualified to practice as a Lawyer in the United States and the United Kingdom. She was admitted to the Bar in New York in 2002 and in England & Wales in 2010. She has also practised at international courts in The Hague including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.
In 2004, she completed a judicial clerkship at the International Court of Justice. She clerked under Judge Vladen S. Vereshchetin from Russia, Judge Nabil Elaraby from Egypt, and ad hoc Judge Sir Franklin Berman from the United Kingdom.
Clooney returned to Britain in 2010, where she became a barrister in London (Bar of England & Wales, Inner Temple) at Doughty Street Chambers. In 2013 Clooney was appointed to a number of United Nations commissions, including as adviser to Special Envoy Kofi Annan on Syria and as Counsel to the 2013 Drone Inquiry by UN human rights rapporteur Ben Emmerson QC into the use of drones in counter-terrorism operations.
As of 2011, Clooney was assisting the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the arbitration between Merck Sharp and Dohme and the Republic of Ecuador.
On 7 August 2014, the couple obtained marriage licences in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London. They married on 27 September 2014 in Venice's city hall (at Ca' Farsetti), following a high-profile wedding ceremony two days earlier, also in Venice. They were married by Clooney's friend Walter Veltroni, a former mayor of Rome. The wedding was widely reported in the media. In October 2014, it was announced that the Clooneys had bought the Mill House on an island in the River Thames at Sonning Eye in England at a cost of around £10 million.
Clooney is the President of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which she co-founded with her husband George Clooney in late 2016 to advance justice in courtrooms, communities, and classrooms around the world.
In February 2017, it was reported by the CBS talk show, The Talk that Clooney was pregnant, and that she and her husband were expecting twins. Friend Matt Damon confirmed the couple's pregnancy to Entertainment Tonight. In June 2017, she gave birth to a daughter and a son, named Ella and Alexander respectively.
In 2018, following the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the Clooneys pledged $500,000 to the March for Our Lives and said they would be in attendance.
