Neal Katyal Biography

Neal Katyal (Neal Kumar Katyal) is an American lawyer and partner at Hogan Lovells, as well as Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

He served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States from May 2010 until June 2011. Katyal previously served in as an attorney in the Solicitor General’s office as Principal Deputy Solicitor General in the U.S. Justice Department.

He has argued more Supreme Court cases than any other minority group lawyer in American history. In 2017, American Lawyer Magazine named Neal Katyal its coveted Grand Prize Litigator of the Year for both the 2016 and 2017 years.

Neal Katyal Education

Katyal studied at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit Catholic school in Wilmette, Illinois. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1991, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Nu fraternity and the Dartmouth Forensic Union.

In 1990 and 1991, while a member of the Dartmouth Forensic Union, Katyal reached the semi-final round of the National Debate Tournament, college’s national championship tournament.

He then attended Yale Law School. In law school, he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and studied under Bruce Ackerman and Akhil Amar, with whom he published articles in law review and political opinion journals in 1995 and 1996.

After receiving his J.D. degree in 1995, Neal Katyal clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Neal Katyal Career

President Bill Clinton commissioned Katyal to write a report on the need for more legal pro bono work. In 1999, Katyal drafted special counsel regulations, which have guided the Mueller investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Katyal also served as Vice-President Al Gore’s co-counsel in Bush v. Gore of 2000, and represented the deans of most major private law schools in Grutter v. Bollinger, the University of Michigan affirmative-action case that the Supreme Court decided in 2003.

While serving at the Justice Department, he 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.

He 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.

Neal 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, Neal 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, he 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, Neal 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.

Katyal 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. He also lectured at Fordham Law School concerning that decision.

Neal 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, Neal Katyal returned to Georgetown University Law Center, but also became a partner at the global law firm Hogan Lovells.

Katyal specializes in constitutional law, national security, criminal defense and intellectual property, as well as running the appellate practice once run by John Roberts. During law school he clerked one summer at Hogan Lovells, where he worked for Roberts before Roberts’s nomination to the US Supreme Court.

Neal Katyal Media

Neal Katyal appeared on The Colbert Report on July 26, 2006; June 17, 2008; and February 27, 2013. He then appeared on a 2015 episode of the US television drama House of Cards, portraying himself, and arguing before the Supreme Court on behalf of a US citizen maimed by a drone strike.

He endorsed President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in an op-ed to The New York Times. When that newspaper’s public editor criticized the op-ed for failing to disclose Neal Katyal had active cases being considered by the Court.

He responded that it would have been obvious he always has cases being heard by the Supreme Court. Katyal formally introduced Judge Gorsuch at the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings.

In addition to Gorsuch, Neal Katyal also spoke highly of President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In multiple tweets that were cited by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Katyal praised Kavanaugh’s “credentials [and] hardworking nature,” and described his “mentoring and guidance” of female law clerks as “a model for all of us in the legal profession.”

Neal has also described Kavanaugh as “very gracious” and “incredibly likable.” “It’s very hard for anyone who has worked with him, appeared before him, to frankly say a bad word about him,” Katyal observed during a July 2018 panel on Kavanaugh’s nomination sponsored by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank.

Neal Katyal Age

Katyal was born on March 12, 1970 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He is 54 years old as of 2024.

Neal Katyal Height

Katyal stands at a height of 5 feet 10 inches tall.

Neal Katyal Family

Katyal was born to Punjabi Hindu immigrant parents originally from India. His mother is a pediatrician and his father, who was an engineer died in 2005.

Neal Katyal Sister

Katyal has a sister, Sonia Katyal, who is also an attorney and currently teaches law at University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

Neal Katyal Wife

Katyal married Joanna Rosen, a doctor of Jewish American heritage in 2001. Katyal’s brother-in-law is Jeffrey Rosen, professor of law at George Washington University and legal affairs editor of The New Republic.

Neal Katyal Net Worth

He has an estimated net worth of around $1 million to $5 million.

Neal Katyal Honors And Awards

Katyal was awarded the Edmund Randolph Award, the highest honor the Department can bestow on a civilian by The US Justice Department. The National Law Journal named him its runner-up for “Lawyer of the Year” in 2006 and in 2004 awarded him its Pro Bono award.

American Lawyer Magazine considered Katyal one of the top 50 litigators nationally.

Washingtonian Magazine named him one of the 30 best living Supreme Court advocates; Legal Times (jointly owed by American Lawyer Media) profiled him as one of the “90 Greatest Lawyers over the Last 30 Years”.

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