1. Neal Katyal is a partner at Milbank LLP and is the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University Law Center.
26 Facts About Neal Katyal
1. 2.
Neal Katyal was born on March 12,1970, in Chicago, Illinois, to immigrant parents originally from India.
3.
Neal Katyal's mother, Pratibha, is a pediatrician and his father, Surendar, who died in 2005, was an engineer.
4.
Neal Katyal's sister, Sonia, is an attorney and teaches law at University of California, Berkeley School of Law.
5.
Neal Katyal studied at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit Catholic high school in Wilmette, Illinois.
6.
Neal Katyal was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and studied under Akhil Amar and Bruce Ackerman, with whom in 1995 and 1996 he published articles in law-review and political-opinion journals.
7.
President Bill Clinton commissioned Neal Katyal to write a report on the need for more legal pro bono work.
8.
Neal Katyal 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.
9.
Neal Katyal is the only head of the Solicitor General's office to argue in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
10.
On May 24,2011, speaking as Acting Solicitor General, Neal Katyal delivered the keynote speech at the Department of Justice's Great Hall marking Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
11.
Neal Katyal specializes in constitutional law, national security, criminal defense, and intellectual property law, as well as running the appellate practice once run by John Roberts.
12.
In 2015, Neal Katyal had a cameo performed in the third season of the American television series House of Cards, portraying a lawyer arguing a case in the Supreme Court.
13.
In 2020, Katyal represented Nestle and Cargill at the Supreme Court in Nestle USA, Inc v Doe, a class-action suit brought by former enslaved children who were kidnapped and forced to work on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast.
14.
Neal Katyal's argument was that Nestle and Cargill should not be held liable under United States law for their use of child slave labor because international law does not apply to corporations.
15.
Neal Katyal cited as an example that the company which supplied Zyklon B to the Nazis to kill Jews and other minorities in extermination camps was not indicted at the Nuremberg trials.
16.
In 2021, Katyal represented financial giant Citigroup in their efforts to recoup a mistaken transfer of $900 million to creditors of Revlon Inc He worked with the prosecution team in State v Chauvin.
17.
In 2022, Katyal argued for the respondents in Moore v Harper before the Supreme Court, a case involving election law, redistricting and the independent state legislature theory.
18.
Neal Katyal's billing rate for this was $2,465 per hour.
19.
On February 12,2025, Milbank announced that Neal Katyal will be leading the appellate practice of their Washington DC office.
20.
Neal Katyal is a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation, an American non-partisan research foundation.
21.
Neal Katyal endorsed President Donald Trump's nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in an op-ed to The New York Times.
22.
When that newspaper's public editor criticized the op-ed for failing to disclose Neal Katyal had active cases being considered by the Court, Neal Katyal responded that it would have been obvious he always has cases being heard by the Supreme Court.
23.
Neal Katyal formally introduced Gorsuch on the first day of his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings.
24.
Neal Katyal's brother-in-law is Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
25.
Neal Katyal attended Burning Man 2023, during which heavy rainfall caused flash flooding.
26.
Neal Katyal hiked six miles in the mud to get out of the festival, which he called "incredibly harrowing".