PERSON: Asha Rangappa

Legal Contributor

Renuka Asha Rangappa (born November 15, 1974) is an American lawyer, former FBI agent, senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and a commentator on MSNBC and CNN. She was previously an associate Dean at Yale Law School. She is serving as a senior lecturer at Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Rangappa is also a member of the board of editors of Just Security.

Rangappa was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to parents from Karnataka, India, who immigrated to the US in 1970. She told Elle that her parents “came under a provision where the government was specially looking for doctors,” under the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Her father is an anesthesiologist and worked at a Virginia army base. Her mother is an accountant. As a child she participated in beauty pageants.

Rangappa grew up in Hampton, Virginia, and graduated from Kecoughtan High School. She graduated cum laude with an A.B. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs in 1996 after completing a 136-page long senior thesis, titled “The Rule of Law: Reconciling, Judicial Institution Building and U.S. Counternarcotics Policy in Colombia,” under the supervision of John Dilulio. Following graduation, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, studying constitutional reform in Bogotá, Colombia. She graduated from Yale Law School with a J.D. in 2000 and completed an internship with the US Attorneys office in Baltimore. And took a clerkship serving the Honorable Juan R. Torruella on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2003 she was admitted to the state bars of New York and Connecticut.

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