Sri Srinivasan

Padmanabhan Srikanth "Sri" Srinivasan (; born February 23, 1967) is an Indian-born American lawyer and jurist serving as the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Before he was a circuit judge, Srinivasan served as Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States and argued 25 cases before the United States Supreme Court. He has also lectured at Harvard Law School.

In 2016, Srinivasan was considered by President Barack Obama as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States after the death of Antonin Scalia; Obama nominated Merrick Garland instead.

Early life and education

Srinivasan was born in Chandigarh, India to Brahmin Iyengar parents. His father, Thirunankovil Padmanabhan Srinivasan, was from Mela Thiruvenkatanathapuram, a village near Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu. Srinivasan's family first came to the United States in the late 1960s when his father had a Fulbright fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. After briefly returning to India, Srinivasan's family permanently immigrated to the United States in 1971 when Srinivasan was four years old. They settled in Lawrence, Kansas, where Srinivasan's father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas. Srinivasan's mother, Saroja, taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and later worked at the University of Kansas's computer science department. Srinivasan graduated from Lawrence High School in 1985, where he played on the school basketball team alongside future NBA star Danny Manning.

After high school, Srinivasan attended Stanford University, graduating in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction. He worked as a management analyst for the San Mateo County county manager's office from 1989 to 1991, then did joint studies at the Stanford Law School and Stanford Graduate School of Business, receiving a JD–MBA in 1995. He was an editor of the ''Stanford Law Review'' and received his law degree with Order of the Coif honors.

Career

After law school, Srinivasan worked as a law clerk for United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III from 1995 to 1996 and for United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor from 1997 to 1998.

After his clerkships, Srinivasan worked for the law firm O'Melveny & Myers and then joined the office of the United States Solicitor General, where he worked from 2002 until 2007. He co-authored a brief in ''Rumsfeld v. Padilla'' where he argued with success that U.S. citizens may be detained by the President of the United States as enemy combatants.. Srinivasan rejoined O'Melveny & Myers in 2007 as a partner, and was the firm's hiring partner for its Washington, D.C. office. While at the firm, he represented ExxonMobil for accusations of human rights abuses by hired military personnel at an Indonesian gas plant. In 2010, he represented former Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling in his appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, which challenged the "honest services" fraud statute and also that Skilling's trial was never moved from Houston. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Skilling on the "honest services" fraud statute, but rejected the trial location argument.

Srinivasan also was a lecturer at Harvard Law School, where he co-taught a course on Supreme Court and appellate advocacy. In 2003, he received the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Furthering National Security. In 2005 he received the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence from the United States Department of Defense.

On August 26, 2011, Srinivasan was appointed to replace Neal Katyal as Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. As of May 2013, Srinivasan had argued 25 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier in his career, he also performed pro bono work for presidential candidate Al Gore during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election.

In 2013, he was part of the legal team that presented arguments before the Supreme Court against the Defense of Marriage Act in the case of ''United States v. Windsor''.

He left the Solicitor General's office on May 24, 2013, upon being commissioned as a Judge of the D.C. Circuit.

Federal judicial service

In March 2010, ''National Review'' blogger Edward Whelan wrote that the Obama administration had been considering nominating Srinivasan to one of two vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and that the idea of nominating Srinivasan had run into opposition from some Obama supporters because of Srinivasan's work in the U.S. Solicitor General's office during the Bush administration, and union animosity to Srinivasan's corporate clients in private practice.

In June 2012, Obama nominated Srinivasan to the seat on the D.C. Circuit. On January 2, 2013, his nomination was returned to the President, due to the sine die adjournment of the Senate; the next day he was renominated to the same office.

His Senate confirmation hearing on April 10, 2013 was uneventful. His nomination was reported out of committee on May 16, 2013, by a 18–0 vote. A final vote on his nomination took place on May 23, 2013, where he was confirmed by a 97–0 vote. He took the oath of office before Chief Judge Merrick Garland in June. At his formal swearing-in ceremony in September, administered by retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, he took the oath on the Hindu holy book ''Bhagavad Gita'' and became the first federal appellate judge of South Asian descent. He became Chief Judge on February 11, 2020.

Notable decisions

In ''Sierra Club v. Jewell'', 764 F. 3d 1 (2014), Srinivasan authored the majority opinion in the D.C. Circuit's split decision holding that environmental groups seeking to protect the site of the historic Battle of Blair Mountain possessed Article III standing to challenge the removal of the site from the National Register of Historic Places in federal court.

Srinivasan authored the D.C. Circuit's decision in ''Pom Wonderful v. FTC'', 777 F.3d 478 (2015), which upheld FTC regulations that require health-related advertising claims be supported by clinical studies while simultaneously trimming the number of studies required on First Amendment grounds.

In ''Home Care Association of America v. Weil'', 799 F. 3d 1084 (2015), Srinivasan authored the D.C. Circuit's decision reinstating, under Chevron deference, regulations that guarantee overtime and minimum wage protection to home health care workers, citing "dramatic transformation" of the home care industry over the past forty years as reason for the change.

Srinivasan authored the D.C. Circuit's decision in ''Hodge v. Talkin'', 799 F. 3d 1145 (2015), which upheld a federal law prohibiting demonstrations in the U.S. Supreme Court Building's plaza as justified by the Supreme Court's interest in not giving the appearance of being influenced by public opinion and as consistent with nonpublic forum viewpoint-neutral restrictions, where demonstrations could proceed on nearby public sidewalks.

In ''Jarkesy v. SEC'', 803 F. 3d 9 (2015), Srinivasan authored the D.C. Circuit's decision holding that the securities laws under the Dodd–Frank Act provide an exclusive avenue for judicial review that plaintiffs may not bypass by filing suit in district court.

Srinivasan authored the D.C. Circuit's decision in ''Simon v. Republic of Hungary'', Slip Op. (2016), holding that Article 27 of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act merely creates a floor on compensation for Holocaust survivors because the text of the 1947 peace treaty between Hungary and the Allies does not bar claims outside of the treaty and because the Allies "lacked the power to eliminate (or waive) the claims of" Hungary's own citizens against their government.

In a July 6, 2021 ruling, ''The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, Inc. v. FDA'', Srinivasan dissented when the majority overturned the FDA's ban on shocking devices, which the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center uses to torture autistic and disabled students. "The result of the majority's ruling," he wrote, is to "force" the FDA to either "abolish a highly beneficial use" of a device "so it can stamp out a highly risky one," or to "stomach the highly risky use so it can preserve the highly beneficial one."

Srinivasan played a culminating role in the Steele Affair (2010-2022). It involved the legal campaign of Dr. Brett D. Steele in response to Vice-Admiral Ann E. Rondeau’s violation of his civil and academic freedom rights at National Defense University (NDU) in 2011 that resulted in his employment termination as an associate professor at NDU’s College of International Security Affairs (CISA). The Steele Affair also concerned violent whistleblowing retaliation at NDU, and the relentless obstruction of justice in the U.S. Departments of Defense (DOD) and Justice (DOJ) to defeat Steele in court. DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta, whom Srinivasan swore in in 2014, initially dismissed Steele’s age-discrimination and retaliation lawsuit against the DOD in ''Steele v. Carter'' (2016). Judges Thomas Griffith, Patricia Millett, Cornelia Pillard of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals then unanimously reversed that ruling by concluding that “substantial” evidence existed that Rondeau discriminated against Steele due to (1) prima facie evidence that Steele was terminated in order to hire much young graduate students to take over his courses, (2) contradictory and shifting pretextual testimony of the DOD witnesses as to why Rondeau terminated Steele, and (3) discriminatory remarks made by Steele’s immediate supervisor. Steele’s attorney
Donna Rucker
spelled out such direct evidence of discrimination and more during the trial, but Mehta ignored or dismissed it in his ''Steele v. Esper'' (2019) ruling in favor of the DOD. His ruling affirmed that the uncorroborated testimony of the DOD witnesses trumps not only the testimony of the plaintiff witnesses and documented evidence from NDU, but also their own contradictory testimony before the trial, which Rucker impeached frequently. Mehta also cited favorable employment actions of older faculty at CISA as evidence that Rondeau did not subject Steele to age discrimination. Steele consequently had Rucker file a second appeal with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Judges Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Patricia Millett and Robert L. Wilkins initially revealed some sympathy to this appeal by rejecting DOJ Assistant Attorney Jane Lyons’ motion for summary affirmance. They also recommended that the case get settled via mediation. According to Lyons, senior military leaders in the DOD vehemently rejected the mediation option given their anger over Steele’s academic-freedom, age-discrimination, and violent-crime complaints at NDU. Srinivasan suddenly replaced all three judges shortly before the oral argument on 9 February 2022 with himself, and Judges Neomi Rao and Cornelia Pillard. In the short three-age decree of ''Steele v. Austin'' (2022) that followed just a month later, they exonerated Mehta by ignoring Rucker’s presentation of all the discrimination evidence Mehta had dismissed or ignored. This includes (1) ''prima facie'' evidence of age discrimination, (2) the contradictory and shifting DOD witness testimony concerning why Rondeau terminated Steele, and the (3) numerous trial impeachments of the DOD witnesses involving contradictory testimony. In addition to Mehta’s “might-makes right” principle that the testimony of DOD witnesses effectively neutralizes all documented evidence of discrimination and pretext, these judges affirmed Mehta’s ruling that NDU’s retention of some older professors countered the evidence of Rondeau's age discrimination against Steele. As Rucker argued, this reasoning violated the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ''Connecticut v. Teal'' (1982) ruling that favorable treatment of some in a protected class does not disprove discrimination against an individual victim like Steele. Without such a principle, Rucker stated “every college or university would immunize itself from ADEA liability by merely employing some professors of the older and wiser generation.” The ''Steele v. Austin'' (2022) decree also falsely stated that Steele’s discrimination claims got neutralized by a younger CISA professor getting terminated at the same time when Steele was. Seth Malguerra was actually on the administrative staff of CISA, a part-time graduate student of Steele, and was immediately rehired by a think tank at NDU. Srinivasan in ''Steele v. Austin'' (2022) thus revealed the degree to which the federal judiciary provides senior military leaders with South Asian-style impunity when accused of violating both constitutional and basic human rights of a U.S. citizen, as well as the obstruction of his quest for justice.

Supreme Court consideration

In April 2013, '' Mother Jones'' suggested that Srinivasan ultimately might be nominated by President Obama for the Supreme Court of the United States; during the same month, Jeffrey Toobin also opined that should he be confirmed for the D.C. Circuit, he would be Obama's next nominee to the Supreme Court. If he had been nominated, he would have been the first Indian American, first Asian American and first Hindu candidate for the Supreme Court.

Following the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on February 13, 2016, Srinivasan was again widely speculated to be among the most likely contenders to be appointed to fill the seat, prior to the nomination of Merrick Garland. After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened to refuse to consider any Obama appointee to fill the seat in an election year, and split political parties in government, it was thought that Srinivasan, who was confirmed 97–0 in 2013, would be politically difficult to block, had he been nominated.

Personal life

Srinivasan lives in Arlington County, Virginia. He has two children.

See also

* Barack Obama Supreme Court candidates
* Joe Biden Supreme Court candidates
* List of Asian American jurists
* List of first minority male lawyers and judges in the United States
* List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 8)

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Srinivasan, Srikanth
1967 births
Living people
20th-century American lawyers
21st-century American judges
21st-century American lawyers
American Hindus
American jurists of Indian descent
American politicians of Indian descent
American people of Indian Tamil descent
Indian emigrants to the United States
Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
Law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States
People associated with O'Melveny & Myers
People from Arlington County, Virginia
People from Lawrence, Kansas
Scholars from Chandigarh
Stanford Graduate School of Business alumni
Stanford Law School alumni
United States court of appeals judges appointed by Barack Obama