Newsmaker

Every Friday, we choose an alum who has been making headlines—for better or for worse.
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Neal Katyal ’95JD

By the staff | 12:19pm October 09 2009

Last time we wrote about Neal Katyal ’95JD, he had just bested the federal government in a US Supreme Court case. Now Katyal is the federal government—a deputy solicitor general, to be exact—and this week, he appeared before the high court in what the New York Times calls “the most important free speech case this term.” In United States v. Stevens, a Virginia man is challenging a federal law that outlaws the sale of dogfight videos and other “depictions of animal cruelty.” Katyal, defending the law in the face of the justices’ questions about foie gras and an imaginary Human Sacrifice Channel, urged the court to avoid an “endless stream of fanciful hypotheticals.” But when Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’79JD compared the banned videos to a documentary about pit bulls, Katyal had to concede, “The line will sometimes be difficult to draw.”

Filed under Law School, lawsuit
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