Kannon Shanmugam

Kannon Shanmugam was born on November 15, 1972, in Lawrence, Kansas, to parents who had immigrated to the United States from India in the late 1960s.[5] His father, Kumarasamy "Sam" Shanmugam, was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Kansas for over 30 years.[6][7]

Shanmugam attended Lawrence High School and graduated as co-valedictorian in 1989 at age 16. He then went to Harvard University, where he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Independent.[8] He graduated from Harvard in 1993 with an A.B. summa cum laude in Classics. After graduating, he won a Marshall Scholarship and spent the next two years in England doing graduate study in Classics at Oxford University, where he was a member of Keble College. He received a Master of Letters degree in 1995.

Shanmugam then returned to Harvard to attend the Harvard Law School. While at Harvard Law, he became the executive editor of the Harvard Law Review and argued the case for the winning side in the Ames Moot Court Competition.[9] He graduated in 1998 with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude.

After graduating from law school, Shanmugam spent two years as a judicial law clerk, first for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1998 to 1999, then for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1999 to 2000. He then entered private practice as an associate at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he worked for noted lawyer and judge Kenneth Starr. In 2004, Shanmugam became an assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General, where he worked for four years and argued eight cases before the Supreme Court. In 2008, he joined the law firm of Williams & Connolly, where he built the firm's Supreme Court and appellate practice. He was the only lawyer to have joined the firm as a lateral partner in 32 years.[10] In 2019, Shanmugam moved to the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to become the managing partner of the firm's Washington office and chair of its newly established Supreme Court and appellate practice.

Shanmugam has served as co-chair of the American Bar Association's Appellate Practice Committee and is also a past president of the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court. He is the only practicing American attorney who is an honorary bencher of the Inner Temple, one of the four English Inns of Court. He taught a course on Supreme Court advocacy as an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and served on the board of trustees of Thurgood Marshall Academy. He is a longtime member of the Federalist Society.[11]

Shanmugam has argued 31 cases before the Supreme Court. Most notably, in 2020, he argued on behalf of Seila Law LLC in the landmark case Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In 2018, he argued on behalf of the victims of the USS Cole bombing and their families in Republic of Sudan v. Harrison.

• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States

• Appearances at the U.S. Supreme Court from the Oyez Project
• Paul, Weiss bio
• Appearances on C-SPAN