Sri Srinivasan

Srinivasan's family first came to the United States in the late 1960s when his father was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

Padmanabhan Srikanth "Sri" Srinivasan (born February 23, 1967) is an Indian-born American lawyer and jurist serving as the chief United States circuit judge of the United States 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.

Srinivasan was born in 1967 in Chandigarh, India, to Brahmin Iyengar Hindu Tamil parents.

His father, Thirunankovil Padmanabhan Srinivasan, was from Mela Thiruvenkatanathapuram, a village near Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu.

After briefly returning to India, Srinivasan's family permanently immigrated to the United States in 1971 when he was four years old.

They settled in Lawrence, Kansas, where his 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.

He then attended Stanford University, graduating in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction.

From 1989 to 1991, he worked as a management analyst for the San Mateo County county manager's office.

He then jointly attended Stanford Law School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, receiving a JD–MBA in 1995.

As a law student, Srinivasan was an editor of the Stanford Law Review and graduated with Order of the Coif honors.

After law school, Srinivasan was a law clerk for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1995 to 1996.

He did a one-year fellowship in the Department of Justice's Office of the Solicitor General from 1996 to 1997, then clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor from 1997 to 1998.

From 1998 to 2002, Srinivasan was in private practice as an associate at the law firm O'Melveny & Myers.

Earlier in his career, he also performed pro bono work for presidential candidate Al Gore during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election.

He then returned to the Office of the Solicitor General, where he worked from 2002 until 2007.

In 2005 he received the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence from the United States Department of Defense.

He 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 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.

On August 26, 2011, Srinivasan was appointed to replace Neal Katyal as Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States.

In June 2012, Obama nominated Srinivasan to the seat on the D.C. Circuit.

As of May 2013, Srinivasan had argued 25 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

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, when he was commissioned as a federal judge.

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 received his commission on May 24, 2013.

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.

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.

He became Chief Judge on February 11, 2020.