Former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, Neal Katyal, currently a
partner at Hogan Lovells law firm in Washington,
DC and Paul Saunders Professor at Georgetown University, will be honored with the
2015 Justice in Action Awards by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education
Fund (AALDEF).
Jessica Hagedorn, novelist, poet, and
playwright; and John W Kuo, senior vice president, general counsel,
and corporate secretary of Varian Medical Systems are the other recipients.
They will receive the awards at AALDEF's Annual Lunar
New Year Gala on February 23, 2015 at Pier 60 in Chelsea Piers, New York City.
The co-emcees for the evening will be Juju Chang, Emmy
Award-winning correspondent for ABC News, and Prof Sree Sreenivasan,
chief digital officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Justice in Action Awards recognize exceptional individuals for their
outstanding achievements and efforts in advancing social justice. Past
recipients include Fareed Zakaria and Mira Nair.
Over 800 leaders of the civil rights, legal, business, and
arts communities are expected to attend AALDEF’s 2015 Lunar New Year Gala.
All proceeds from the Lunar New Year Gala will go directly
towards supporting AALDEF's legal and educational programs in immigrant rights,
economic justice for workers, voting rights and civic participation,
educational equity, and the elimination of hate violence, police misconduct,
and human trafficking.
Katyal was principal deputy solicitor general in the
Justice Department. He served as acting solicitor general after solicitor
general Elena Kagan departed the post to become a Supreme Court Justice. Many
expected him to become the solicitor general, but the president appointed White
House attorney Don Verrilli to the post.
Katyal could have reverted to his post as principal
deputy solicitor general, but he opted to quit.
As Acting Solicitor General, he was responsible for
representing the federal government of the United States in all appellate
matters before the US Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals throughout the
nation.
As Acting Solicitor General of the United States, 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 8 states who sued
the nation's leading power plants for contributing to global warming, and a
variety of other matters.
He served as Counsel of Record hundreds of times in the US
Supreme Court. He was also the only head of the Solicitor General's office to
argue a case in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, on the
important question of whether certain aspects of the human genome were
patentable.
Katyal focuses on appellate and complex litigation. He has extensive
experience in matters of patent, securities, criminal, employment, tort, and constitutional
law. He has orally argued 22 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States,
with 20 of them in the last five years.
Katyal has also served as a law professor for 15 years 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 served as a visiting professor at both Harvard
and Yale Law Schools.
He is a recipient of the highest award given to a civilian
by the US Department of Justice, the Edmund Randolph Award, which the Attorney
General presented to him in 2011. The Chief Justice of the United States
appointed him in 2011 (and again in 2014) to the Advisory Committee on
Federal Appellate Rules. He was named as One of the 40 Most Influential Lawyers
of the Last Decade Nationwide by National Law Journal(2010); and one of
the 90 Greatest Washington Lawyers Over the Last 30 Years by Legal
Times (2008)
He was lead attorney for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a driver for
Osama bin Laden, who is detained in Guantanamo.
In 2000, Katyal served as co-counsel for Vice
President Al Gore in the US Supreme Court election case Bush v. Palm Beach
Canvassing Board, which challenged the Florida
voting system.
