Video & Photos: George Clooney & Amal Alamuddin-Clooney get married twice in two days

George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin apparently love getting hitched so much that they decided to do it twice in two days. The couple, who have held Hollywood and European press rapt with their four days of parties and galas, had a 14-minute civil ceremony in Venice’s 13thCentury town hall. The brief exchange of vows formalized the Saturday night affair at a seven-star hotel along the Grand Canal. Though Clooney professed to want a private wedding, his marathon of star-studded nuptial events suggest otherwise. “If they had really wanted a secret wedding, then they shouldn’t have done it down the Grand Canal,” said a Venetian local.What you may not have known about the new bride, AMAL:Amal Alamuddin, who married George Clooney on Saturday, is smart, beautiful and, by all accounts, a cracker-jack human rights attorney. Clooney, by contrast, is a 50-something (former) bachelor with a history of commitment issues. So why has much of the press focused on her “landing” him and not the other way around? Those in the international circles in which they travel say Clooney is lucky to have her.
Born to Lebanese Druze parents in 1978 during the height of the Lebanese Civil War, she and her family left for London when she was 2 years old. Her mother, Baria Alamuddin, is an award-winning journalist and foreign editor of the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat, while her father is a retired professor from American University of Beirut.
Alamuddin studied law at both NYU’s Law School and at Oxford, where she earned her degree in 2000. While at NYU, she was a student law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and later clerked for three years at the International Court of Justice.
She has since become an accomplished and feisty human rights lawyer.  In London, she has practiced at the Doughty Street Chambers firm and represented the likes of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. She has worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the U.N. Special Tribunal for Lebanon and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
She has also been an appointed to several U.N. panels, where she has acted as an adviser to former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Anan on Syria and was counsel on the 2013 inquiry into the use of U.S. armed drones in counter-terrorism operations in places like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
This year, after the latest Israel-Gaza war, she was reportedly invited to join the U.N.’s commission investigating possible war crimes in Gaza, but turned down the appointment.
She was named London’s hottest barrister by hit legal blog Your Barrister Boyfriend, which declared her to be “both breathtakingly beautiful and formidably successful.” As a “source close to Clooney” reportedly told People magazine this year, Alamuddin is “on his level”—if not a cut above. Alamuddin is such a well-respected lawyer that, shortly after the couple announced their engagement, Josephine Tovey wrote in The Age that it should be Clooney who “should be thanking his lucky stars, having snagged one of Britain’s most eligible bachelorettes.”“If our world was one that valued achievements in education, politics and human rights as much as it did celebrity, headlines around the world would have this week screamed: ‘Sorry boys—Amal is taken,’” she wrote.
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