A child of Indian immigrants, raised far from Washington’s power corridors, has helped redraw the outer limits of presidential authority in the United States. Neal Kumar Katyal’s success in persuading the Supreme Court to strike down President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs is both a constitutional milestone and a distinctly human story of family migration, professional discipline, and the quiet power of excellence.
Katyal is a product of the Indian professional middle class that began moving to America in large numbers in the 1960s—doctors, engineers, academics—people who carried with them a fierce faith in education and a strong moral instinct about public institutions. His mother, Pratibha, became a paediatrician; his late father, Surendar, was an engineer. They built a life in the Chicago area and raised their children in a home where hard work was expected and public service respected.
From suburban Chicago to the Supreme Court bar
Born in Chicago on 12 March 1970, Katyal attended Loyola Academy, a Jesuit high school near the city, where he began to hone the habits that define elite advocacy: argument as craft, discipline as habit, and persuasion as patience. He went on to Dartmouth College, where he studied government and Indian history and was active in competitive debate, before earning his law degree from Yale.
The classic apprenticeship followed. He clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then for Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. Those clerkships did not merely polish technique; they placed him inside the constitutional machine-room he would later address from the advocate’s lectern.
Over time, Katyal built a career that blended academia and high-stakes public law. He became a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, and served in the Obama administration as Principal Deputy Solicitor General and Acting Solicitor General—arguing on behalf of the United States itself. He has since argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court, across the ideological spectrum, earning a reputation as one of Washington’s most formidable appellate advocates.
The tariff gambit that tested the Constitution
The controversy that carried Katyal into the centre of this moment was born in a manoeuvre that, on paper, looked technical. Trump’s administration attempted to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose sweeping “reciprocal” global tariffs—an across-the-board duty on imports, with higher levies on selected countries and sectors.
The justification was framed in the language of emergency and national security. Trade deficits, unfair foreign practices, and even fentanyl overdoses were cited to support the claim that extraordinary presidential action was necessary. But the constitutional question was stark: could a President, by declaring an “emergency”, assume the practical power to tax the American people without Congress?
Small businesses, enormous stakes
What gave the case its democratic texture is that the litigation did not begin with multinationals. It began with smaller American businesses and trade associations whose operations were suddenly destabilised by abrupt, wide-ranging duties. They argued that the President had exceeded what the statute allowed and, more fundamentally, had encroached upon Congress’s exclusive authority over taxation and foreign commerce.
Katyal was brought in to lead the Supreme Court battle. His role mattered not only because he is an elite advocate, but because he understands, instinctively and doctrinally, that constitutional outcomes are often decided by framing: what is this power, really? What is this act, in substance? What is this “emergency” being used to accomplish?
The argument that made the justices look up
Katyal’s central move was to force a structural recognition: tariffs function as taxation, and taxation is constitutionally rooted in the legislature. The Constitution’s basic design is that Congress imposes taxes, and the executive executes the law. Congress may delegate some authority, but when a President claims a power of vast economic and political significance, the delegation must be explicit.
He argued that the emergency statute in question was intended for targeted sanctions and embargo-like controls in genuine crises—not as a standing, presidential engine to rewrite the tariff schedule for the world. If the Court accepted the administration’s reading, any future President could declare a suitably elastic “emergency” and impose sweeping levies without legislative consent, hollowing out the separation of powers by a thousand economic cuts.
The Supreme Court draws a line
The Supreme Court agreed, striking down the tariff programme. Its reasoning was straightforward in principle and consequential in effect: the emergency statute does not clearly authorise the imposition of broad tariffs, and courts will not infer such a vast power from general language—particularly when the power resembles taxation, a core legislative function.
In doing so, the Court delivered more than a blow to one President’s trade strategy. It curtailed a broader temptation: the use of emergency laws as shortcuts to achieve major economic outcomes that belong, constitutionally, in the legislative arena.
Katyal’s post-verdict restraint—and his one-line thesis
Katyal treated the ruling as institutional rather than partisan. He spoke of constitutional design, not political personalities. Yet he also understood the communicative power of brevity. After the verdict, he posted a three-word line that captured the case’s essence in plain English—without theatrics, without ornament. “Tariffs are taxes”.
He allowed himself a small, lawyerly smile at the long arc of strategy, reposting an earlier analysis with the dry aside, “This aged well.” But he was careful not to frame the outcome as a personal triumph. His emphasis, on X, was institutional rather than self-congratulatory: “A victory for the Constitution today.”
Why this matters beyond America—and beyond this case
For Trump, the verdict is a major judicial defeat and a constraint on economic nationalism by executive proclamation. For Congress, it is a rare restoration of authority. For constitutional law, it is a reaffirmation that emergency powers have limits—and that courts will demand clarity before allowing the executive to exercise sweeping authority over the economy.
But there is also a wider resonance. For Indians, and for the global Indian diaspora, the story carries symbolic weight. The son of immigrants—products of India’s professional middle class—stood at the heart of a case that reaffirmed the supremacy of constitutional design over executive impulse. In an age when democratic systems everywhere wrestle with the expansion of executive power, that is not a small lesson.
Democracies are not preserved only by elections. They are preserved by institutions—and by the people trained to defend them. Sometimes, those guardians sit not in cabinet rooms or legislatures, but at counsel’s table, speaking in the restrained, disciplined language of law. And sometimes, the values that bring them there were first learned at an immigrant kitchen table in suburban America.