YouSaid · the spoken record

Neal Katyal

lines on the record: 110
first: 2019-12-09
most recent: 2019-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, you know, I've always been a kind of tech guy, and so always interested in it. And when I came out of the government,”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly Yeah, so once I won that, then other folks started to hire me. And in the government, you represent all sorts of things before the Supreme Court. And so I had any number of cases. I mean, you know, I had the patent ability of the human genome, in particular BRCA genes 1 and 2, which I spent a lot of time on seeking the invalidation of 20,000 patents that had been issued since the Reagan administration, which the biotech industry was not happy with me for doing. And they said we'd lose that case and we wound up wanting it 9-0 in the Supreme Court when they invalidated all those patents on the human genome. So it did that. The Constitutional Voting Rights Act and a number of different things. And then I left the government and came back to teach Georgetown and then also now run one of the largest Supreme Court practices in the country.”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“U.S. born family. That's a pretty remarkable thing, but it's what this country is built on. And so that's what offended me so much about Guantanamo, this idea that only foreigners would get to go to Guantanamo. If you were one of the 12 million green card holders like my parents or the 7 billion foreigners, you could be accused of a crime and get sent to Gitmo. But if you were a U.S. citizen and accused of the worst crime imagine, well, say detonating a weapon of mass destruction, you got the Cadillac version of justice, the American Civil Trial, no Gitmo. And that just, you know, we've never done that in our history before. President Bush is the first time.”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you know, it was interesting when I first went down, I wound up representing bin Laden's driver, so I'm a bin Laden's driver at Gitmo. And he asked me exactly that. He's like, why are you here? Why are you representing me? And I remember I paused for a while. I was like, you know, I don't have a straight answer to this. And then I thought to myself, I should say a law professor because I'm not a very good lawyer if I can't answer a question. But I said to him this. I said, look, my parents came to this country from another and they came not because of the quality of its soil or its sports teams or things like that. They came for one simple reason. They thought that they could land on its shores from their country, India and be treated fairly, not perfectly, but fairly and better than any other country on earth. And I said to this guy, bin Laden Striver, I said, you know, that's always been my experience from schools to the jobs I had in the government. I mean, national security advisor at the Justice Department with no US-born parents,”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solicitor. Solicitor general All right, so we're going to talk about both those things, but what made you want to do that with Guantanamo? Why did that strike your you to push on that one? There's so many interesting legal challenges going on all over the place.”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so I first testified and I wrote Laura Review articles and nothing changed. And then I said to myself, look, I got a file lawsuit. So I filed the lawsuit. I brought it all the way up to the Supreme Court. It was my first case and I won. And once we won that, then a lot of different individuals wanted to hire me to do their Supreme Court cases, including then Senator ultimately President Barack Obama. So I quention as his number two courtroom lawyer, and then I became his number one courtroom lawyer for a time when Elena Kagan went up to the Supreme Court. Solicitor General, right? Yeah. And then ever since then, I've been arguing Supreme Court cases for half the week, basically, and the other half of the week advising technology companies on really hard legal problems. All right.”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was in the wake of 9 11. A lot of really stringent laws were passed, many of which were probably problematic on every level. But this was one of them. And here's out of safety concerns about the United States and protecting the United States. And it's often that balance. But what happened is they created this.”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, back in 2001 and November, the president issued a military order that said that he could set up a whole trial system at Guantanamo from scratch in which he could hand pick the prosecutors and the defense attorneys and the judges and the appeals judges and handpick the defendants and write all of the rules for the trial, including the punishments, which he said include the death penalty. He said they had zero constitutional rights. And the last lines of the president's order said the federal courts have no business reviewing what I'm doing at Guantanamo Bay, no writ of habeas corpus. So I'm a big believer in presidential power and in national security, but I thought that went way, way too far.”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I'm a Supreme Court lawyer and I'm a law professor at Georgetown. I went to law school pretty sure I wanted to teach law and got detoured a little bit with a national security job at the Justice Department, but I was really just a law teacher. And then I was outraged by what I saw happening at Guantanamo in the Bush administration. Explain that for people.”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the truth is, you know, I've been dying to do this podcast. I have one foot in Silicon Valley at all times. And, you know, I've just seen your influence there and the podcast is amazing this episode accepted. And it's just a real honor and privilege.”
2019-12-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Neal Katyal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT