Amber Ashley James is a lawyer, organizer, and entrepreneur building toward a liberated future – by ending systems of violence and exploitation, and birthing new worlds of care and safety for all people and our one planet.
Born and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, Amber first became acquainted with The Law through her parents, who are both attorneys. Amber first started questioning The Law because of her paternal Grandfather, who spent many years incarcerated in Kansas after being convicted by an all-white jury. One of her earliest academic memories is writing a research report on racism in the application of the death penalty in middle school. The fundamental questions of who The Law serves, and who it harms, have stuck with Amber throughout her life.
At age 17, Amber left sunny South Florida for cold Cambridge to attend Harvard College. Curious about the world and her place in it, she studied English literature, African-American history, and Mandarin Chinese. Volunteering at under-resourced schools in over-exploited Black and brown neighborhoods for four years taught Amber more about how the world works, and how it needs to change than any course did. In her senior year, Amber was accepted to Harvard Business School’s 2+2 Deferral Program. A trusted mentor advised Amber to get a job that would teach her “hard skills” to complement her liberal arts education before returning to graduate school. Amber followed that advice and joined Morgan Stanley as an Investment Banking Analyst in the Mergers & Acquisitions group after college. While working notoriously long hours as a banking analyst, she developed dynamic financial models to value companies and presented analyses for buy- and sell-side transactions of more than $100 million, in industries ranging from aerospace to technology to steel manufacturing.
After two years on Wall Street, Amber took her hard-won “hard skills” and moved to Beijing, where she worked for education start-ups, traveled throughout Asia, and learned to survive as a Black girl in Beijing with rusty Mandarin skills. During Amber’s adventure in Asia, she realized all the news she followed back home involved The Law -- police had murdered another Black person, the officers had evaded accountability, and civil unrest had inevitably followed. Another trusted advisor recommended she apply to law school, and her gut confirmed the advice was sound. She took the LSAT at Peking University, was accepted to Harvard Law School, and returned to cold Cambridge to embark on the JD/MBA program.
Amber collected a range of meaningful personal and professional experiences while pursuing her degrees. She interned for an organic feminine care products company in New York, and an NGO representing Romani victims of discrimination and police violence in Budapest. She represented indigent criminal defendants in Massachusetts and helped organize a campaign to divest Harvard's endowment from companies harmful to people and the planet. Amber served as Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the nation’s oldest and leading progressive law journal. Through independent projects and courses at both HBS and HLS, Amber spent years researching the actors who invest in and profit from the multi-billion dollar industries of state violence and human caging in the U.S.; she then applied that research in testimony against investments in prison companies at Boston City Council meetings. While visiting prisons in the US and Palestine, Amber learned from incarcerated people, their loved ones, and their attorneys about how The Law is weaponized against oppressed groups, and how criminal punishment impacts whole communities.
In her legal career, Amber has worked at top-ranked law firms, including Skadden Arps and Latham & Watkins, and served clients ranging from world-famous entertainers to vegan meat companies to incarcerated people and immigrant detainees. Her experience spans corporate law and litigation, including reviewing contracts, negotiating agreements, drafting complaints, and filing lawsuits. Amber has spoken extensively on panels, in keynote addresses, and at cocktail parties about the movement to abolish prisons and policing, and the big questions that have stuck with her since she was a child -- who does The Law serve, what interests does The Law protect, and what communities does The Law harm? Amber has also hosted political education sessions on these topics for audiences from New York to Nigeria, and a weekly “Abolition 101” series on Instagram live with over 20,000 views.
Amber is an avid reader, globe trotter, meditation practitioner, visual artist, dog lover, devoted plant mom and plant medicine believer. She is thrilled to be a part of the ALIGNED GENERATION journey, putting her legal and business skills to work for the good of the planet, and all the life it sustains.
