Well-known attorney and former Acting Solicitor General of the United States Neal Katyal is one of three individuals who will be honored by The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund at its annual gala Feb. 23 in New York City.
Katyal, partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells, and Paul Saunders Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., will receive the 2015 Justice in Action Award. The other two recipients are John W. Kuo, senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of Varian Medical Systems; and Jessica Hagedorn, novelist, poet, and playwright.
The AALDEF Justice in Action Awards recognize exceptional individuals for their outstanding achievements and efforts in advancing social justice. Katyal has been on various lists of top lawyers in the country over the last decade, and has orally argued 24 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, with 22 of them in the last six years. He has won some landmark cases including the Whistleblower Act case, DHS v. MacLean.
As Acting Solicitor Geneal he successfully defended the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; scored a victory in his defense of former Attorney General John Ashcroft for alleged abuses in the war on terror; winning a unanimous victory against 8 states who sued the nation’s leading power plants for contributing to global warming, and a variety of other matters. At the Justice Department, he received the highest award given to a civilian, the Edmund Randolph Award, in 2011.
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 question of whether certain aspects of the human genome were patentable.
He was one of the youngest professors to receive tenure and a chaired professorship during his 15 years teaching at Georgetown University Law Cente. He was also Director of the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law until his appointment to Principal Deputy Solicitor General at the Justice Department. Additionally, he served as a visiting professor at both Harvard and Yale Law Schools. A graduate of Yale Law School, Katyal clerked with Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.
Past recipients of the AALDEF award include several other Indian-Americans such as comedian Aasif Mandvi, journalist Fareed Zakaria, and film maker Mira Nair. More than 800 leaders of the civil rights, legal, business, and arts communities are expected to attend AALDEF’s 2015 Lunar New Year Gala at Pier Sixty, Chelsea Piers, the organization said in a release.