Intended Audience
The Center for the Study of Democracy is pleased to welcome Neal Katyal to deliver the Judge William O.E. Sterling Constitution Day Lecture on September 16, 2022. He will speak on "The Supreme Court, the Rule of Law and the Future of American Democracy" at 7:00 pm in the Auerbach Auditorium of St. Mary's Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
Neal Katyal, the former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, focuses on appellate and complex litigation. In December 2017, American Lawyer magazine named him The Litigator of the Year, chosen from all the lawyers in the United States.
Katyal has extensive experience in matters of constitutional, patent, 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. One of these cases was his win in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which declared the Guantanamo military trials unconstitutional and ensured that the Geneva Conventions applied to the war on terror--which in turn ended waterboarding and ghost prisons around the world. In the 2016-17 term alone, he 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.
Prior to joining Hogan Lovells, he 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. As Acting Solicitor General, he was responsible for representing the federal government of the United States in all appellate matters before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals throughout the nation.
He 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.
Katyal has also served as a law professor for over 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.
For more details, visit the Center's website at smcm.edu/democracy.