Amreeta Mathai

Amreeta Susy Mathai is the inaugural Director of Strategy and Program at the New York Civil Liberties Union where she is a member of the Executive Leadership team guiding long-term organizational and inter-departmental strategic planning across the NYCLU’s portfolio of civil liberties and rights issues. In this role, she oversees the Legal, Policy, and Field-organizing departments. She also focuses on the intersection of surveillance technology, algorithmic decision-making, and civil rights and liberties. Outside of the NYCLU, Amreeta serves on New York City Bar Association’s Committee on Civil Rights and on the sub-committee of the Bar Association’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies focused on civil rights. She is also on the Board of Terra Firma, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing holistic medical-legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in the United States.

Prior to joining the NYCLU, Amreeta was a Senior Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, where she specialized in economic justice, indigent defense, and algorithmic discrimination work. She litigated cases involving debtors’ prisons, other forms of wealth-based discrimination, Covid-19 jail/prison detentions, and submitted amicus briefs and administrative comments on algorithmic discrimination and other civil rights issues implicating tech and AI. She has published academic papers on the use of risk assessment tools in the criminal legal system and the need for plain language in the legal system. Amreeta was the founder and inaugural chair of the ACLU Lawyer Training program, which offers robust training to all ACLU and ACLU-affiliate attorneys across the United States.

Prior to joining the ACLU, Amreeta was a Team Leader and supervising attorney at the Bronx Defenders where she managed an interdisciplinary team of advocates in criminal, civil, family, and immigration defense. As a civil defense attorney, she directly represented hundreds of clients in a variety of legal proceedings stemming from interactions with the criminal legal system including sealed records issues in criminal court, eviction and civil forfeiture proceedings, and employment public benefits hearings. Amreeta also served as a Lecturer-in-Law in the clinical program at Columbia Law School where she lectured on holistic public defense.

After graduating from law school, Amreeta clerked for the Honorable Ivan L.R. Lemelle in the Eastern District of Louisiana. While in law school, Amreeta participated in the Predatory Lending Prevention/Consumer Protection Clinic in Jamaica Plains, Boston, the Harvard Human Rights Clinic, and interned with plaintiff side employment firm Vladeck, Raskin & Clark, P.C as well as the ACLU’s National Security Program. She was also the President of the South Asian Law Students Association. Amreeta received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, her M.Phil. in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, and her B.A. in History from the University of Chicago.