Neal Kumar Katyal (born March 12, 1970) is an American corporate lawyer and academic. He is a partner at Hogan Lovells and the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University Law Center. During the Obama administration, Katyal served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States from May 2010 until June 2011. Previously, Katyal served as an attorney in the Solicitor General's office, and as Principal Deputy Solicitor General in the U.S. Justice Department.
Katyal has argued more U.S. Supreme Court cases than any other minority lawyer in American history. He has described himself as an "extremist centrist".
Early life and education
Katyal was born on March 12, 1970, in Chicago, Illinois, to immigrant parents originally from India. His mother is a pediatrician and his father, who died in 2005, was an engineer. Katyal's sister, Sonia, is also an attorney and teaches law at University of California, Berkeley School of Law. He studied at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit Catholic high school in Wilmette, Illinois. He graduated in 1991 from Dartmouth College, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Nu fraternity and the Dartmouth Forensic Union.
Katyal then attended Yale Law School. He was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and studied under Akhil Amar and Bruce Ackerman, with whom he published articles in law review and political opinion journals in 1995 and 1996. After receiving his JD in 1995, Katyal clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court.
Career
President Bill Clinton commissioned Katyal to write a report on the need for more legal pro bono work. In 1999 he drafted special counsel regulations, which guided the Mueller investigation of the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. He also represented Vice President Al Gore as co-counsel in Bush v. Gore, and represented the deans of most major private law schools in Grutter v. Bollinger.
While serving at the Justice Department, Katyal argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court, including his successful defense (by an 8–1 decision) of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Northwest Austin v. Holder. Katyal also successfully argued in favor of the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, and won a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court defending former Attorney General John Ashcroft against alleged abuses of civil liberties in the war on terror in Ashcroft v. al-Kidd. Katyal is also the only head of the Solicitor General's office to argue in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
As Acting Solicitor General, Katyal succeeded Elena Kagan, whom President Barack Obama chose to replace the retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens.
On May 24, 2011, speaking as Acting Solicitor General, Katyal delivered the keynote speech at the Department of Justice's Great Hall marking Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Developing comments he had posted officially on May 20, Katyal issued the Justice Department's first public confession of its 1942 ethics lapse in arguing the Hirabayashi and Korematsu cases in the US Supreme Court, which had resulted in upholding the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent. He called those prosecutions—which were only vacated in the 1980s—"blots" on the reputation of his office, which the Supreme Court explicitly considers as deserving of "special credence" when arguing cases, and "an important reminder" of the need for absolute candor in arguing the United States government's position on every case. Katyal also lectured at Fordham Law School concerning that decision.
Katyal was critical of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. While teaching at Georgetown University Law Center for two decades, he was lead counsel for the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), which held that Guantanamo military commissions set up by the George W. Bush administration to try detainees "violate both the UCMJ and the four Geneva Conventions."
Upon leaving the Obama Administration, Katyal returned to Georgetown University Law Center, but also became a partner at the global law firm Hogan Lovells. He specializes in constitutional law, national security, criminal defense, and intellectual property law, as well as running the appellate practice once run by John Roberts. During law school Katyal clerked one summer at Hogan Lovells, where he worked for Roberts before Roberts's nomination to the US Supreme Court.