Emma James
Emma James

Emma James has never been one to do things halfway.The New Zealand native, an alumna of Mahindra UWC and Colby College and a member of the first graduating class of Davis UWC Scholars, in 2004, was well-known to her fellow students as a bold and deeply engaged activist. While at Colby, she did disaster-response and preparedness work for the Red Cross in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; she also helped research a Red Cross report on human trafficking in Asia, for which she spent time interviewing girls in Delhi brothels.

  Emma was a student representative to Colby’s Board of Trustees — and this year she rejoined the college board, this time as a regular member. “It’s very exciting to get back to the States and re-engage with Colby,” Emma says.

After college, “I went straight to Cambridge University, where I went to law school,” she reports. She was a Senior Scholar, completing the three-year law program in two years. “It’s quite stupid, really,” she quips today — “it means you have a lot more work to do than anyone else. But I was in a hurry.”

Back in the U.S. in 2006, she earned a post-graduate master’s degree in law at Columbia University, focusing on a mix of human-rights and corporate law, and passed the New York Bar Exam on her first try. Emma is now working 90-hour weeks — “that’s a good week, actually” — as a litigator for the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher in Manhattan.

“It’s a very large, international firm,” she says. “It does everything; it’s taking me all over the place. I’m able to use my British and European law backgrounds, which is great. Currently I’m on just one case, a complex transnational securities litigation, which is absolutely mammoth.”

It’s hard to see the future when you’re so engrossed in the present. For now, Emma says, “This is where I want to be.”