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United States Neal Katyal is a distinguished legal scholar and litigator, notable for his roles as former Acting Solicitor General of the United States and a leading appellate attorney.
Neal Katyal is a partner in the Washington, DC office of Milbank LLP and a member of the firm's Litigation & Arbitration Group.
Neal Katyal is the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He has also served as a law professor there for over two decades.
Upon leaving the Obama administration, Katyal became a partner at the global law firm Hogan Lovells. He worked on cases such as *Janus v. AFSCME* and *Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis* which were characterized as a 'major win for employers.'
In 2020, Katyal represented Nestlé at the Supreme Court in *Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe*, a class-action suit brought by former enslaved children.
In 2020, Katyal represented Cargill at the Supreme Court in *Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe*, a class-action suit brought by former enslaved children.
In 2021, Katyal represented financial giant Citigroup in their efforts to recoup a mistaken transfer of $900 million to creditors of Revlon Inc.
In 2022, Katyal represented Johnson & Johnson in a civil suit against the company for selling talcum baby powder contaminated with carcinogens. His billing rate for this work was $2,465 per hour.
As of May 2021, Katyal is a board member of Chamath Palihapitiya's venture capital firm Social Capital.
Katyal is a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation, an American non-partisan research foundation.
Neal Katyal, born on March 12, 1970, in Chicago, Illinois, is an American lawyer and legal scholar. His parents, immigrants from India, included a pediatrician mother and an engineer father. He attended Loyola Academy, a Jesuit Catholic high school, and then graduated from Dartmouth College in 1991, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He later earned his Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1995, serving as an editor for the Yale Law Journal. Following law school, Mr. Katyal clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court, laying the groundwork for his future legal career. He also served in the Deputy Attorney General’s Office at the Justice Department as National Security Advisor and Special Assistant to the Deputy Attorney General from 1998 to 1999.
From 2010 to 2011, Mr. Katyal served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States, representing the federal government in appellate matters before the US Supreme Court and various Courts of Appeals. During this tenure, he argued several significant Supreme Court cases, including a successful defense of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and a victorious defense of former Attorney General John Ashcroft. He has argued 52 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, with 53rd and 54th expected. His landmark victories include striking down the Guantanamo military tribunals in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) and winning Moore v. Harper in the 2022-23 term, a case described as crucial for American democracy. Mr. Katyal has also been a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center for over two decades, where he was among the youngest to receive tenure and a chaired professorship.
Currently, Mr. Katyal is a partner in the Washington, DC office of Milbank LLP, where he focuses on appellate and complex litigation across various legal areas including antitrust, corporate, constitutional, and intellectual property law. He is a best-selling New York Times author, has published numerous scholarly articles in prominent law journals, and has testified before both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. His contributions to the legal field have been widely recognized through numerous awards, including the Edmund Randolph Award, the highest civilian honor from the U.S. Department of Justice, and being named Litigator of the Year multiple times by The American Lawyer. He has also made appearances on popular news programs and even acted in television series such as Netflix’s House of Cards and Showtime’s Billions.
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