Dartmouth Events

"The Supreme Court and National Security Law," Neal Katyal '91, J.D.

Neal K. Katyal ’91, former Acting U.S. Solicitor General; Partner, Hogan Lovells, LLP; Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law, Georgetown University.

Friday, August 3, 2018
4:00pm – 5:15pm
Room 003, Rockefeller Center
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Lectures & Seminars

Neal Katyal is a partner at Hogan Lovells LLP, and focuses on appellate and complex litigation. In December 2017, American Lawyer magazine named him The Litigator of the Year. At the age of 48, he has also already argued more Supreme Court cases in U.S. history than has any minority attorney, recently breaking the record held by Thurgood Marshall.

Neal has extensive experience in matters of patent, constitutional, technology, securities, criminal, employment, and tribal law. He has orally argued 37 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, with 35 of them in the last nine years. In the 2016-17 term alone, Neal argued seven cases in six separate arguments at the Supreme Court, far more than any other advocate in the nation—nearly 10% of the docket. His 2017 win in Bristol Myers Squibb v. Superior Court was a landmark victory for personal jurisdiction law.

Neal served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States, where he argued several major Supreme Court cases involving a variety of issues, such as his successful defense of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his victorious defense of former Attorney General John Ashcroft for alleged abuses in the war on terror, his unanimous victory against eight states who sued the nation's leading power plants for contributing to global warming, and a variety of other matters. He was also 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.

Neal has also served as a law professor for more than two decades at 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. He has also served as a visiting professor at both Harvard and Yale law schools.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Neal clerked for The Honorable Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as well as for The Honorable Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served in the Deputy Attorney General's Office at the Justice Department as National Security Advisor and as Special Assistant to the Deputy Attorney General during 1998-1999.

Neal is the recipient of the very highest award given to a civilian by the U.S. Department of Justice, the Edmund Randolph Award, which the Attorney General presented to him in 2011. The Chief Justice of the United States appointed him in 2011 (and again in 2014) to the Advisory Committee on Federal Appellate Rules. Among other honors, he was named as One of the 40 Most Influential Lawyers of the Last Decade Nationwide by National Law Journal (2010); Appellate MVP by Law360 numerous times (most recently in 2017); winner of the Financial Times Innovative Lawyer Award for 2017 in two different categories (both private and public law); One of the 90 Greatest Washington Lawyers Over the Last 30 Years by Legal Times (2008); one of GQ's Men of the Year (2017); Lawyer of the Year by Lawyers USA (2006); Runner-Up for Lawyer of the Year by National Law Journal (2006); and one of the top 500 lawyers in the country by LawDragon magazine for each of the last 11 years. He also won the National Law Journal's pro bono award in 2004. He recently played himself, arguing a Supreme Court case against the Solicitor General, in an episode of House of Cards on Netflix.

Neal attended Dartmouth College (A.B., Government) and Yale Law School.

 

For more information, contact:
Joanne Needham
603-646-2207

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.