Nikita Lalwani

Nikita Lalwani is a law clerk at the United States District Court, Southern District of New York. A graduate of Yale Law School, she served as an Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal and as a team leader in the Peter Gruber Rule of Law Clinic. She also served as co-president of the Yale Law National Security Group, co-director of the Yale chapter of the International Refugee Assistance Project, and as a Kerry Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. In Spring 2020, she co-taught an undergraduate seminar at Yale College on writing and foreign policy; her own writing has appeared in publications including The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Los Angeles Times, NewYorker.com, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post.

Before law school, she worked as a staff editor at Foreign Affairs in New York, where she commissioned and edited articles on U.S. foreign policy and international affairs, and helped teach a course at Columbia Journalism School on gender and migration. She also spent a year reporting for The Wall Street Journal in New Delhi, India, covering politics, global health, and women's and LGBT rights. In May 2013, Nikita received her undergraduate degree from Yale, graduating magna cum laude and with distinction in English. She also has an M.Phil. in American History, with first-class honors, from the University of Cambridge, where she wrote a dissertation on U.S. refugee policy during the Cold War. Nikita grew up in California and New York, and in her free time enjoys rock climbing, tennis, and watching Netflix.