Preska was born in Albany, New York,[3][4] on January 7, 1949,[4] to her father, Victor, an engineer at Benét Laboratories at Watervliet Arsenal, and her mother, Etta Mae, a registered nurse.

[6][7] She grew up in the Albany suburb of Delmar, where she was active in the Girl Scouts and graduated from Bethlehem Central High School.

[4] She primarily practiced commercial civil litigation in the federal courts,[10] but also represented several officers of EF Hutton in grand jury proceedings in connection with a case in which the company entered criminal guilty pleas.

[14] As chief judge, Preska pressed for more adequate funding for the federal judiciary,[15] which suffered from the effects of the Great Recession[8] and budget sequestration.

[17] On September 9, 2008, Bush nominated Preska to a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to replace Judge Chester J. Straub, who retired.

In Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corp. (1996), Preska ruled that an image of the actor Leslie Nielsen seemingly pregnant that mimicked a similar photo of Demi Moore was fair use as parody.

Preska ruled that the service was a commercial misappropriation rather than mere media coverage, but dismissed the NBA's copyright and Lanham Act false-advertising claims.

Jewell, who was wrongly suspected of being the Centennial Olympic Park bomber, alleged that several articles, headlines, photographs, and editorial cartoons in the newspaper had libeled him.

[34][37] In 2015, Preska approved a settlement agreement between the federal government and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, terminating the consent decree that had been in place for 25 years.

The consent decree required certain reforms to combat organized crime influence and corruption within the union, and had been entered into in 1989 to settle a civil racketeering suit brought against the Teamsters by the government.

[38] In Bloomberg L.P. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2009), Preska presided over a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by Bloomberg L.P. against the Federal Reserve System, seeking to compel the Fed to provide documents revealing the identity of recipients of bailout money during the 2007–2008 financial crisis, along with the types and amounts of collateral provided.

Preska sided with Bloomberg News reporters, concluding that the Fed's claims that disclosure would cause an "imminent competitive harm" to borrowers were merely conjecture.

[41] The case went to the Supreme Court, but was dismissed as moot due to Congress's enactment of the CLOUD Act in 2018, which created a process for U.S. investigators to access data stored overseas.

)[44] In 2008, Susan Lindauer, a former journalist and congressional aide charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government, was released after Preska ruled her unfit to stand trial, saying that she was "highly intelligent" and "generally capable of functioning at a high level in many ways," but suffered from a mental disease or defect that left her with "a lack of connection with reality" and rendered her "unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against her or to assist properly in her defense.

In pronouncing sentence, Preska cited the defendant's "depraved acts of physical and psychological violence" including forcing Captain Richard Phillips to undergo a mock execution.

[46] Preska oversaw the criminal case against Hector Xavier Monsegur ("Sabu"), a computer hacker who assisted Anonymous and others in cyberattacks targeting credit card companies, various governments, and media outlets.

[47][48] Monsegur became a government informant immediately after his arrest in early 2011, and pleaded guilty in August 2011 to twelve counts of hacking, fraud, and identity theft.

[54] In 2017, Preska sentenced former Rikers Island guard Brian Coll to 30 years in prison for beating inmate Ronald Spear to death in 2012.

[55] Coll had been convicted the preceding year of deprivation of civil rights resulting in death, obstruction of justice, falsifying records, and conspiracy.

Coll repeatedly kicked Spear, a seriously ill pretrial detainee in the jail complex's infirmary unit, in the head while other guards held the inmate face-down on the floor.

During the sentencing hearing, Preska criticized a "culture of violence and poor treatment of inmates" at Rikers and referred to the "particularly vicious and callous" nature of Coll's attack on Spear.

With regards to Preska, "[...] The Working Group is of the view that Judge P did not act in a manner which was independent, objective and impartial in relation to Mr. Donziger's case.