- Mon October 21, 2024 at 8:00 pm
Neal Katyal has argued more than 50 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. He runs one of the world’s largest Supreme Court practices at a firm where he occupies the role formerly held by Chief Justice John Roberts. He focuses on democracy protection, the Supreme Court, constitutional law, criminal law, intellectual property, and blockchain technology.
Katyal served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States. At the age of 54, he has already argued more Supreme Court cases in U.S. history than any other minority attorney, breaking the record of Thurgood Marshall. In the 2022-2023 term alone, he argued five cases before the Supreme Court — 10% of the docket that term. He was the only head of the Solicitor General’s office to argue a case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, on the important question of whether certain aspects of the human genome were patentable.
He successfully defended the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Katyal is also a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he was one of the youngest professors to have received tenure and a chaired professorship in the university’s history.
Katyal has received numerous legal accolades, including being named one of the top 200 lawyers in the United States by Forbes Magazine in 2024. He has published dozens of scholarly articles in law journals and op-ed articles in every widely read U.S. newspaper. He has testified numerous times before various committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
A frequent contributor to MSNBC and the New York Times, Katyal has been named one of GQ’s Men of the Year and has appeared on virtually every major American news program, as well as House of Cards, where he played himself. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and Dartmouth College.
Note: NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg was originally scheduled to appear on this date.