Indian-American attorney Neal Katyal argued the highest number of cases before Supreme Court in 2016

Neil Katyal, a partner at Hogan Lovells, is the former Acting U.S. Solicitor General during the Obama administration. He has argued a total of 34 cases before the Supreme Court, 32 of them in the last 8 years. In 2016-2017 alone, he argued 7 cases in 6 separate arguments before the nation’s highest court, according to Hogan Lovells.

This, according to Empirical Scotus new study put out May 8, by the news site that monitors attorneys, 6 cases is higher than any other attorney in the country argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016.

At the age of 47, Katyal has argued more Supreme Court cases in U.S. history than has any attorney from a minority community, i.e. Indian- American, except for African American Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall with whom he is currently tied.

He has fought and won cases for and against the federal government. As Acting Solicitor General of the United States, Katyal successfully argued cases for the federal government. For instance, he defended the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; his victory in the case defending former Attorney General John Ashcroft for alleged abuses in the war on terror; he won a unanimous victory against 8 states who sued the nation’s leading power plants for contributing to global warming, among them.

While in the Justice Department, he served as Counsel of Record hundreds of times in the U.S. Supreme Court, according to his biography on the Hogan Lovell’s website. 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 whether certain aspects of the human genome were patentable.

He has other firsts to his name. He has served for almost 2 decades as 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.

“Neal Katyal was far and away the most active attorney at arguments this year (Katyal led all other attorneys in arguments even when including federal government participation),” Empirical Scotus said. “Amazingly, Katyal’s six arguments accounted for over 9% of all arguments before the Court this term,” it added.

A graduate of Yale Law School, Katyal 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.

He has dozens of published scholarly articles and awards, according to the Hogan Lovells website. His other awards include the 2011 Justice Department’s Edmund Randolph Award, the highest award given to a civilian by the department. Before that, in 2010, Katyal was named as One of the 40 Most Influential Lawyers of the Last Decade Nationwide by National Law Journal; One of the 90 Greatest Washington Lawyers Over the Last 30 Years by Legal Times (2008); Lawyer of the Year by Lawyers USA (2006); One of the Top 50 Litigators Nationwide 45 Years Old or Younger by American Lawyer (2007); and one of the top 500 lawyers in the country by LawDragon Magazine for each of the last nine years. He also won the National Law Journal’s pro bono award in 2004.

(Based on a press release)