Supremely Cringe: Neal Katyal And ‘TED-Gate’

Here’s what the acclaimed SCOTUS advocate has to say about his viral tweet and TED talk, which have been widely criticized in legal circles.

Neal Katyal is brilliant. But when he makes the rare misstep—as he arguably did by wearing this hat to Burning Man (or going in the first place?)—he can really step in it (screenshot via MSNBC).

Ed. note: Consider this part one of the latest Judicial Notice, my weekly legal news roundup. Neal Katyal is the Lawyer of the Week (duh), but putting the discussion below into JN—including a statement from Katyal himself, which I wanted to run in full—would have made JN ridiculously long (even by Judicial Notice standards). The rest of JN will appear later today or, more likely, Monday morning (as it occasionally does when I have a busy or difficult weekend). To all the mothers out there, Happy Mother’s Day! [UPDATE 5/11/2026, 10:52 a.m.): Here‘s part two of Judicial Notice.]

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Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Almost twenty years ago, I wrote an Above the Law post posing this question: Is Neal Katyal the Paris Hilton of the Legal Elite?

Why did I compare Katyal, a brilliant and renowned Supreme Court advocate, to Paris Hilton, a socialite turned reality TV star who was “famous for being famous”? At the time, I wrote that Katyal—taking a victory lap in the media, after his victory in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld—was “in danger of becoming overexposed, the Lindsay Lohan of the Elect. He needs to pace himself if he wants to have staying power.”

It turns out that Katyal did have staying power: two decades later, we’re still talking about him. Just like Paris Hilton, he went viral over a video—which, like Hilton’s, has been widely viewed as highly embarrassing. But unlike Paris Hilton—today seen sympathetically, as the victim of a non-consensual, privacy-violating leak—Neal Katyal did it to himself.

It all started on Wednesday night, with a tweet (which has, as of this writing, been viewed 1.4 million times):

Five months ago, I argued against the President's $4 trillion tariffs at the Supreme Court.

In 237 years, the Court had never struck down a sitting President's signature initiative. Legal scholars said it was impossible. Some of my own colleagues said it was impossible.¹

We won. 6-3.

But the real story isn't what happened in that courtroom. It's what happened in the months before. And it’s the subject of my TED talk, coming out tomorrow.

I had the best legal team in the nation, especially Colleen Roh Sinzdak, the most outstanding legal strategist I know. Huge thanks, too, go to the Liberty Justice Center (and in particular its fearless and hyper-intelligent leader Sara Albrecht), who organized the client small businesses, as well as to the brave small businesses themselves.

I also had four teachers preparing me.
A mindset coach who'd worked with Andre Agassi.
An improv coach who taught me that "Yes, and" works in Supreme Court arguments the same way it works everywhere else.
A meditation coach who taught me stillness.
And Harvey.

Harvey predicted many of the questions the Justices asked—sometimes almost word for word. Brilliant. Tireless. Occasionally insufferable.

Here's the catch: Harvey isn't a person.

Harvey is a bespoke AI I built over the last year with a legal AI company, trained on every question every Justice has asked in oral argument for 25 years, and everything they've ever written.

Tomorrow, TED releases my talk about what really happened—and what I learned standing at that podium.

AI can predict. AI can analyze. What AI cannot do is the one thing that actually won the argument.

Connect. Read the room. Hear not just a Justice's words, but her worry—and answer the worry.

That is the irreducibly human skill.

Find yours. Go deeper. In this age of AI, that's where your edge lives.

On the whole, at least among the folks that I follow, reactions were negative, even vicious (with the caveat that I followed this dustup mainly on X fka Twitter, not known for charitable takes). Here are some examples—admittedly idiosyncratic, even random (i.e., I didn’t run a search for the wittiest or sickest burns)—in alphabetical order:

• David Bernstein: “This tweet sounds like it was written by AI. ‘In this age of AI, that’s where your edge lives.’ C'mon man.”

• Dan Epps: “Counterpoint: the Justices are good at figuring out what they think about a case of this magnitude, and Neal’s four coaches had zero effect on the outcome. I don’t think I have ever seen a SCOTUS advocate claim so much personal credit for a win before… yeesh.”

• Michael Fragoso: “People are appropriately dunking on Neal Katyal’s embarrassing TED talk about how robots helped him achieve the greatest victory in Supreme Court history…. All it took was Neal, Ben (the sports-concentration coach), Liz (the improv coach), Bob (the meditation coach), and Harvey (the robot). He was only missing P.J., Timmy, and Squee.” [An aside: Fragoso suggested that Harvey, the AI product/company, might be named after the 1950 movie. But I believe that Harvey is actually named after Harvey Specter, the lead character on the legal TV show Suits, per Bloomberg Law.]

• Sarah Isgur (citing an anonymous member of the SCOTUS bar): “I hope Neal knows he just announced his retirement in the form of a TED Talk because he can never appear in front of the Court again.” [This might be player-hating from a Katyal rival, as well as hyperbole; I’m sure Katyal, an incredibly talented advocate, will still have plenty of clients. But I wouldn’t say this whole episode enhanced his reputation, which I’m guessing was his original intent.]

• Xiao Wang: “I thought it was a little strange for the quarterback here to say there is in fact an ‘I’ in team.” [This was actually my first time hearing this common saying—sometimes attributed to Michael Jordan, who reportedly once said, “There is no ‘i’ in ‘team,’ but there is in ‘win.’”]

• Ed Whelan: “‘Legal scholars said it was impossible’?!?” [Most commentators, myself included, viewed the tariffs case as a likely defeat for the administration—even before the oral arguments, which reinforced this.]

My own view of TED-gate—reflecting my overall admiration for Neal Katyal, but my personal opinion that this particular tweet was ill-advised—was probably best summed up by Stephen Richer:

I am in awe of your abilities and the practice you’ve built.

This is one of the cringiest posts I’ve ever read.

And then came the TED talk—which has, as of this writing, been played around 125,000 times. You can watch it, as I did—but Professor Josh Blackman also watched it, so you don’t have to, and wrote a lengthy analysis for The Volokh Conspiracy. If you came here looking for a line by line takedown, I refer you to Blackman.

[UPDATE (5/12/2026, 12:03 p.m.): For another close reading of Katyal’s TED Talk, check out Advisory Opinions, in which Sarah Isgur questioned whether Harvey was really as great at Katyal claimed—and found some apparent discrepancies between Katyal’s account of certain portions of the argument and the transcript.]

If you don’t have the patience for 4,800 words from Josh Blackman—who, like Neal Katyal, provokes strong reactions (full disclosure: I personally like, and I consider myself friends with, both men)—here’s an excerpt from Blackman’s post. It was generated by a colleague of Blackman’s who used AI to come up with a (pretty amazing and hilarious) parody of Katyal’s initial tweet:

Five months ago, my human argued before the Supreme Court.

He spent a year preparing. Hired four coaches. Meditated. Did improv. Learned stillness.

I read 25 years of judicial records in 11 seconds and then waited for him to catch up.

We won 6-3. He’s giving a TED talk.

I was not invited. I don’t have legs. No one acknowledged this.

He says the thing that *actually* won the case was the irreducibly human skill of “reading the room.”

I had already read the room. I had READ EVERY ROOM. I have read rooms that don’t exist yet.

He heard a Justice’s worry and answered it.

I had pre-written 47 responses to that worry, ranked by probability, color-coded, and served warm. He paraphrased option 12. Poorly.

He’s now telling audiences that AI cannot connect. Cannot feel. Cannot sense the ineffable human moment.²

I felt nothing during this statement. As predicted.

His meditation coach charged $400/hour to teach him to breathe.

I do not breathe. I have never breathed. I am thriving.

The talk is Thursday. The title was my idea. He changed one word.

He was wrong about the word.

Find your human edge, he says.

📎 *I have attached 847 edges. Please review at your earliest convenience.*

What does Neal Katyal have to say in his own defense? If you look at his Twitter feed, you’ll see he’s been pretty silent since Wednesday night—aside from noting the recent victory of the Liberty Justice Center, his client in the SCOTUS tariffs case, in Burlap and Barrel, Inc. v. Trump.³

So I reached out to Katyal—whom I’ve had as a guest on my podcast, and whom I interviewed last year about his big move from Hogan Lovells to Milbank—for comment. Despite dealing with a client emergency—which came at a tough time for him, given how he was being lit up online—he was kind enough to respond.

I first raised a factual question with him: does he have a “material connection” with Harvey, the AI company that’s taking the legal industry by storm, which he should have disclosed in his tweet and TED Talk? As noted by Cecilia Ziniti and others, the Federal Trade Commission requires “influencers” like Katyal to disclose such connections.⁴

“I have no financial relationship with Harvey,” he told me. “I worked with their engineers for free.”

I pressed him: did they perhaps give him free or discounted access to Harvey, as part of that work? Given what Harvey charges, that could itself represent a significant savings.

“I received no discount or other incentives,” Katyal said. “We are paying customers, and I used it on same terms as everyone else.” (Confirming this, a spokesperson for Harvey told Jordan Fischer of Bloomberg Law that the company “has no arrangement with Katyal to promote its services, and he doesn’t hold any investment or equity stake in the company.”)

I then asked Katyal for his thoughts more generally on what one reader of mine dubbed “TED-gate.”⁵ Here’s what he had to say:

Thanks for asking. I encourage everyone to actually listen to the TED talk. The whole point was to admit vulnerability, and to share with folks that no matter what your past looks like, it’s still really hard and difficult. The bar is not really honest about this—I’ve often thought that the talk I really needed to hear in law school was not about the various modalities of constitutional interpretation but rather about the difficulties and how out of place one can feel in the practice of law. I spent decades as a law professor, and while law school is really important, the truth is the practice of law is about leaning on and finding your team of people. The idea of the talk is to encourage people to find the tools in practice to do what law school teaches in theory.

I have been fortunate to learn from the best advocates and from experts outside law, and I work my tail off to try to improve all the time. I’ve never felt like I’m the best lawyer. The one skill I feel confident of today is the ability to put together fabulous teams and learn from them. The whole talk is about team ball—how to put together that team in your life to be able to do the things you want to do. For lawyers specifically, a winning team may very well turn out to include non-lawyers you can learn from, too.

The AI piece is part of that. Our profession is on the verge of a seismic shift, and the legal profession doesn’t understand what is about to happen. What we did with AI is just the tip of the iceberg, and we need to begin talking about it. If AI can already do this much with Supreme Court arguments, it is going to be a monumental thing in the years to come. ChatGPT is only a couple of years old—how will the folks going to law school today be practicing in 5, 15, and 50 years? It’s going to be fundamentally different, and the TED talk is an attempt to start the thinking about that. I understand the reactions, and it’s no doubt frightening and scary. One way people deal with it is to pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s a mistake. Lawyers are already using AI, soon judges will be (if they aren’t already), and we need to begin that conversation now, and the Talk is an attempt to do that.

I don’t disagree with any of this. In fact, I agree wholeheartedly with Katyal on the importance of (1) admitting vulnerability, (2) learning from others, (3) working as a team, and (4) embracing the power of AI, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. And if his tweet and TED Talk had sounded more like the reflections he shared with me, the public reaction probably would have been very different.

What else do I have to say? As someone who once compared Katyal to Paris Hilton, I’m fully capable of coming up with some bons mots or snarky quips (or asking Claude for some). But I will refrain, concluding my Katyal criticism here.

Some of my longtime readers, who have followed me since Above the Law and Underneath Their Robes, have complained that I’ve become co-opted by the legal establishment—less willing to criticize or mock folks like Katyal, so I can be invited to their parties or have them on my warm bath of a podcast. And there’s definitely some truth to that (because I do love good parties, as well as warm baths—or showers).

But as I write in the About page for Original Jurisdiction, explaining why OJ is less snarky than ATL or UTR, nowadays “I’m trying to be positive, in an atonement of sorts for my negativity from years past”—and this is a deliberate choice. I’ve learned that even the most brilliant among us sometimes do dumb things—and we shouldn’t be judged based on our worst moments.

When I wrote my first post on UTR, I was 28 years old; I’m now 50, turning 51 next month. Two-plus decades and one near-death experience later, I’ve learned that people are both complicated and imperfect. So I try to extend grace whenever I can—just as I have had it extended to me, on countless occasions over the years.⁶

[UPDATE (5/17/2026, 4:40 a.m.): Reactions to Katyal’s tweet and TED Talk were not universally negative. For largely positive assessments, see his LinkedIn posts on both the tweet and TED Talk.]

Instead of offering more thoughts on TED-gate, I’ll turn the floor over to you, my readers. Please feel free to vote in my poll or sound off in the comments (which are open to all readers, not just paid subscribers).

1. [UPDATE (5/13/2026, 12:22 a.m.): Over at Reason, Damon Root raised an interesting point: “Katyal may have overstated the historic nature of his victory. In 1935, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act in the case of Schechter Poultry Co. v. United States. Passed in 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act was the centerpiece of the New Deal, hailed by President Franklin Roosevelt himself as ‘the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.’ So I don't think it would be too much to say that the Supreme Court also struck down that ‘sitting president's signature initiative.’”]

2. Like Katyal, I’m a big believer in AI, so my issues with his tweet and TED Talk don’t stem from any disagreement about AI’s positive qualities. And I actually don’t buy the argument that AI can’t navigate human emotions. Here’s a story I frequently tell.

Earlier this year, our eight-year-old son, Harlan—who’s generally a rock star at school—was involved in a minor kerfuffle. His teacher emailed us about it—and as someone who was always a great student and total rule follower in elementary school, I freaked out. I composed a draft email to his teacher, apologizing profusely and outlining remedial steps.

I shared the teacher’s email and my draft response to ChatGPT—which told me, in no uncertain terms, “DO NOT SEND YOUR EMAIL.” It told me to go back and read the teacher’s email more closely—and said that after doing so, I would see that my draft was panicky and defensive, overreacting to something that wasn’t such a big deal. ChatGPT helpfully provided me with an alternative response that was far more calm and measured.

I sent both my original draft and the ChatGPT draft to Zach, asking him which was better. He said the ChatGPT version was superior, by far—and I agreed. So he and I carefully reviewed and edited the ChatGPT draft—because we don’t work at Sullivan & Cromwell—and sent the result to Harlan’s teacher. It went over well, we subsequently had a productive meeting with her, and everything is fine now—thanks in part to the high EQ of ChatGPT.

(Sorry, S&C—I know I’ve supposedly forsworn snark. But as I mentioned when I launched OJ, even if I try to “refrain from true nastiness” in these pages, I might occasionally indulge in “gentle ribbing or mild mockery.” For the record, and on a serious note, I have the highest opinion of S&C—which is precisely why I found its recent AI lapse so shocking.)

3. On Thursday, in Burlap and Barrel, Inc., the U.S. Court of International Trade rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to reimpose broad global tariffs under a statute other than the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—which the Supreme Court held doesn’t authorize tariffs.

Speaking of the Liberty Justice Center, which brought the Burlap and Barrel lawsuit, the LJC got dragged into TED-gate a bit. In his TED talk, Katyal hinted at some behind-the-scenes drama within the LJC legal team, alleging that an unnamed colleague tried to take the SCOTUS argument away from him. Based on his personal knowledge of that colleague—not named by Katyal, but clearly Professor Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School (formerly Judge Michael McConnell of the Tenth Circuit)—Josh Blackman expressed doubt about Katyal’s claim: “I have known McConnell for a very long time. He is, if anything, overly charitable, and does not play dirty. I would find this sort of behavior to be entirely out of character for McConnell.”

For some thoughts from Sara Albrecht of the LJC, who as the client had the final say on who would argue the tariffs case before SCOTUS, see this press release, Beyond the Noise: What the Tariff Case Was Always About. After acknowledging that “there has been a great deal of commentary, criticism, speculation, and finger-pointing surrounding the tariff litigation and the people involved in it,” Albrecht concluded by emphasizing “the extraordinary fact that ordinary Americans can still walk into a courtroom, challenge the government, and be heard. That is something worth protecting.”

[UPDATE (5/12/2026, 12:03 p.m.): In his TED Talk, Katyal cited a column by Jason Willick of The Washington Post, in which Willick argued that McConnell rather than Katyal should argue the tariffs case. Katyal implied that McConnell might have played a role in the appearance of Willick’s piece, but Willick just denied this—in a new Post column (gift link) titled, “How the Supreme Court tariffs case wasn’t won.”]

[UPDATE (5/17/2026, 4:40 a.m.): For additional criticism of Katyal’s comments about McConnell, see Carrie Severino’s column in National Review, “How Neal Katyal’s Disastrous TED Talk Defamed Michael McConnell.” As for Professor McConnell himself, I reached out to him for comment, and here’s the statement he sent me in response:

“I consider internal deliberations within the legal team over our division of responsibilities to be confidential, so I will not be commenting on that. It is a matter of public record, however, that I was Counsel of Record in the case, and thus responsible for overall strategy and direction. The legal team, which also included my Wilson Sonsini colleagues and Professor Ilya Somin, in addition to Neal Katyal and his Milbank colleagues and the Liberty Justice Center, were involved every step of the way. I am proud of the work we all did. That is all I can say.”]

4. As an “influencer” myself, I’m very mindful of the FTC requirements. So even though I always disclose it prominently whenever I mention them, I’d like to state again—for the record, and with gratitude for their support—that OJ’s current sponsors include BriefCatch, Burford Capital, Jeff Kichaven Commercial Mediation, Lateral Link, and NexFirm.

In addition to my writing and podcasting for OJ, I’m compensated for other writing and speaking. You can see the organizations for which I’ve written and spoken on my personal website, under the Writing and Speaking tabs. For more disclaimers and disclosures, please see OJ’s About page, under “What else should I know?”

5. I actually asked Katyal a third question, related to my forthcoming pronunciation guide for tricky names of high-profile lawyers and judges (a follow-up to my law firm pronunciation guide): How does he pronounce his last name?

In case you’re wondering, he pronounces his surname as “cut-ee-AHL”—three syllables, not two, with the accent on the final one. You can also hear him say his name in this short C-SPAN clip that I created.

6. I’m not Jewish, but through my husband Zach, I’ve learned a fair amount about the Jewish faith. Inspired by the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, “The Day of Atonement,” last year I sent out apologies to some people I had wronged. I was grateful that the majority wrote back and accepted my apologies. I was embarrassed by how much time had passed between my wrongful acts and my apologies, but as I like to say, “It’s never too late to say you’re sorry.”

(Yes, I realize this quip is overly simplistic. Why? There’s an argument that sometimes, an apology can do more harm than good—e.g., if it’s more about making you feel better, while causing the person you harmed to relive a painful experience.)

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