Kannon Shanmugam
on SCOTUS, DOJ, Antonin Scalia, Ken Starr, and changing meanings of words
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Hello, welcome everyone to another very special episode of The Yunusov Question. My special guest that I'm very honored to have here today is Kannon Shanmugam. I can talk very long about who Kannon Shanmugam is. Basically, he is one of the leading Supreme Court of the United States litigators. He is the managing partner or chair of the Washington, D.C. office of Paul Weiss, the leading law firm in the world. And many, many other things. Hello, Kannon.
Hi, Pulat. It's great to be with you.
It's really good to have you. And I want to talk about all these highlights and milestones in your career and bio. You know, you clerked for Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States. You were assistant to the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice. You worked for Ken Starr when you were an associate at Kirkland& Ellis. And I heard about Ken Starr when I went to grad school in Pittsburgh in 1998, 1999, and 2000. So that was a familiar name to me. You were a partner at Williams& Connolly LLP, where you built the appellate Supreme Court of the US practice. You then became partner at Paul Weiss, where you are today chair of the Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation Practice, chair of the Washington office, and co-chair of the litigation department.
So I do want to talk about all of these things, but I really want to start with your first name. I find it really cool. So, Kannon. And to an English-speaking person, Kannon as the first name is the next best thing to having Law is the first name, right? I don't know any people named Law. Maybe they exist, but Kannon is really the next best thing. Can you tell me about the origin and the history of this name?
Well, I will say that the associate two doors down from me is Arpine Lawyer, which I've always thought is just the coolest name. So I think I'm second best at best in our office. But, Pulat, it's great to be with you. So That's a great question, one I've never answered on a podcast. So let me tell you about my name. So my parents emigrated from India to the United States in 1968. They emigrated to, of all places, Stillwater, Oklahoma, and then moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where they put down roots and where I was born. And so I was the firstborn of two boys, and my parents decided that they wanted to give me a fairly traditional South Indian name Kannan, which is usually transliterated K-A-N-N-A-N.
But they decided that they needed to Americanize it a little bit, so they switched it to Kannon. And so it's really an unusual name. There's like a Japanese god of love who's spelled Kannon the same way. But what's really interesting about it is that, you know, I thought it was a completely novel name. And then one of my dear friends from college actually named his son Kannon. Spelled the same way. And funnily enough, it has been kind of climbing the charts. Now, I wouldn't want to pretend that it's as common as like William or Henry. I've got one of each of those in my family, but it is actually not completely unheard of to be a Kannon now.
And it's a lot harder to get Kannon as like a username when I log on to new websites. And so I, of course, take full credit for this. As at least for now the most famous Kannon, but hopefully one day in the not too distant future, there'll be someone better known who comes along. It's pretty low bar, frankly.
You know, you mentioned your parents. I know that your dad was an engineer. And what did your mom do?
So my mom, it's actually a great story. She dropped out of school to marry my dad and to move to the US, and then went back to college when I was in high school. She went to the University of Kansas where my dad taught for many years, and she majored in computer science and actually worked for a time at KU as a computer scientist. And so I'm definitely the fruit that fell far from the tree. My brother also majored in computer science. He now teaches at the business school at KU. My wife is a doctor, so I'm really the only person in the family who has no real skills.
Well, speaking of skills, what do you think made you fall so far from the tree of science and technology? Who set you on that path? I mean, hearing the evidence so far, it sounds like your first name did it. It's almost, almost sealed your fate. But did your parents talk to you about law? And you have you seem to have a fairly strong interest in classics, which we will talk about. I'm really interested in that. What set you, set you down on that path? Lawyer. Your dad, engineer. Mom, computer scientist. Brother, computer scientist. And you marry a doctor. So you obviously, you come from science and technology. You, you are attracted to people of science.
Why a lawyer?
So I just like hanging around scientists. I just didn't want to be one, Pulat. So I was very serious about math and science in school. I was actually at the risk of bragging, the Kansas State math champion. But then when I got to high school, my interests really started to change, and I had an exceptional high school Latin teacher by the name of Anne Shaw. My high school is one of the 2 high schools in the state of Kansas, the 2 public high schools that taught Latin. And so she was really an inspirational teacher. But I think more generally, I just started to be more interested in the humanities and public policy.
And when I went to college and I was fortunate enough to go to Harvard, I thought I was going to major in government or economics. And then just on a whim, I took a Latin class in my freshman year. And really loved it. It was a class on Ovid, of all things, and it just, it really inspired me. And so I called up my parents and told them that I thought I was going to major in classics. And to their credit, they did not freak out, but they basically said, as long as you do something productive at a later stage in life, we'll be totally fine with this. And so, you know, that was really a major no pun intended, decision in my life because I think I got a great education.
I think anyone who goes to Harvard gets a great education, but I got a particularly great education as a result of majoring in classics. And one thing led to another as a result of that. I won the Marshall Scholarship and got to study classics for another 2 years, met my wife in England, and it really was a decision that just had really significant ripple effects for me throughout the rest of my life.
I wonder if your parents' consent to your choice of major was contingent on your commitment to receive straight A's regardless of the subject
matter. I think that was always an implicit commitment in my family, which I tried to live up to, not always successfully. But I think they, to their credit, realized that law was potentially in my future. I was a very serious college journalist. So I think they knew that journalism was also something that I might end up pursuing. And in some sense, for both of those fields, classics is a perfectly reasonable thing to major in because it teaches you how to think about language. It teaches you how to write, teaches you how to be logical. And those are obviously important skills for law and journalism and a lot of other professions.
Well, just so our audience knows how committed you were to classics before you went to law school, you took classics courses. You majored in classics for 6 years in a row, 4 years at Harvard, 2 years at Oxford. You obtained a bachelor's in classics from Harvard. You obtained a master's of literature in classics from Oxford. This is a huge commitment. And it's really interesting to me that you clerked for Justice Scalia. In that regard. And let me explain why it's interesting to me. So I knew— what I knew about Justice Scalia before was probably what other people or most people knew about him. You know, he was a Supreme Court of the US justice.
I knew about his views. I knew about his decisions until I started reading Brian Garner's book— books. And Brian Garner is the leading authority on legal writing, I think, in the US. and his books are just amazing. And he worked closely with Justice Scalia. He— they wrote a book together, at least one. And Brian Garner also interviewed Justice Scalia, and he recorded those interviews, and he published them online. And in one of these interviews, he asked Justice Scalia why he thought that legal writing or writing was important for lawyers. I mean, it seems like an obvious question with an obvious answer. But Justice Scalia started talking about the meaning of the word alibi when he answered that question.
And when he started talking about the meaning of that word, he really was talking about how lawyers take words that had a certain meaning and then slowly embellish or extend the meaning of that word. And he was a little bit upset that what really meant he was elsewhere in Latin, literally, or elsewhere in Latin, started to mean an excuse or explanation or justification. And he also complained in that answer that maybe people stopped learning Latin. And he said that lawyers used to know Latin a lot better than today. Do you think that the study of classics, do you think that the study of the roots of the Western tradition and of maybe specifically the English common law tradition is not as common today as before?
And do you think it has any repercussions on how lawyers practice law and how judges make decisions?
Yeah, I'm happy to answer that question, but I have to say, first of all, that one of the ripple effects of majoring in classics is that I'm quite convinced that that is why Justice Scalia hired me, because he had never had a law clerk who had majored in classics. And even during the interview, it was clear that he was just so enamored by the idea of having one that he was willing to look past my many shortcomings. And many years later, he essentially confessed that I was the beneficiary of a most peculiar form of affirmative action and that I had been hired because I was a classics major. So go figure. But he loved language.
And, you know, the story you tell about alibi just sounds like classic Justice Scalia. I've never actually heard that portion of the interview, but I'm sure he would have talked at great length about how it was an adverb that turned into a noun. And that was just Justice Scalia. He loved language, not surprisingly, as someone whose dad was a professor of Romance languages. It was in his blood, and he really cared about it. And I think that that's why I care about it, too. I think that the law is really all about language. At the end of the day, it's about the language in, you know, in the US, our Constitution, our statutes. The crafting of language in judicial opinions is extraordinarily important.
It has dramatic consequences. Even one word that is misplaced in a Supreme Court opinion can set off a whole body of jurisprudence. And so understanding language, understanding not just the meaning of words, but grammar and structure is just critically important. And I am not in any way an apologist for the study of fields like the classics. I get the, you know, dead white guys criticism. Of fields like classics, but at the same time, you know, our culture in so many ways derives its roots from Greek and Roman society. Our language owes the most to Greek and Latin, although one of the wonderful things about the English language is it draws words from Greek and Latin and it draws words like ukulele from Hawaiian.
And that is one of the things that makes English so distinct and special. But I think we're living at a time where the intellectual value of studying subjects like the classics has been somewhat lost. And I think in the rush to focus on understandably important subjects like STEM subjects, that universities are at risk of de-emphasizing and therefore losing subjects like the classics. And my old Oxford college no longer has a fellow in the classics. My high school ended its Latin program. And these are things that concern me very deeply because once they're lost, it's not easy to get them back.
You attracted Justice Scalia's attention with your classics background, as you said. I'm sure that you were able to maintain his attention and interest with other things as you clerked for him. How did Justice Scalia influence you as his law clerk, as his former law clerk?
I think he influenced me just tremendously, as he influenced the entire American legal system and the way that he thought about law, in the way that he wrote so incredibly vividly and with such incredible engagement. But he really almost single-handedly, and he certainly had some colleagues in this regard, was responsible for the rise of the originalist approach to constitutional interpretation, the textualist approach to statutory interpretation. And for someone like me who really cared about and loved language to begin with you know, that had an enormous influence on the way that I think about the law. You know, I saw a study a few years ago that suggested that among repeat players in the Supreme Court, that my briefs tend to be the most textualist and originalist.
And I suspect that there's probably a certain truth to that, just because that influence is such a profound one. And of course, that isn't to say that there aren't cases where you make other types of arguments too. But I think, as I think about the law, I often think to myself, how would Justice Scalia have thought about this question?
Going back to the alibi story, that Justice Scalia told in his interview to Brian Garner, he was bemoaning this trend of lawyers extending meanings of words, meanings of words that were subject to very old and general consensus for a very long time. And today, words lose their meanings or, or change their meanings because it suits clients. Obviously, lawyers perform instructions of clients, and clients instruct lawyers, and lawyers on clients' behalf argue new meanings, different meanings, extended meanings. And in that sense, do you think— and in that sense, of course, lawyers exercise their influence on judges when they advocate. And judges, when they write decisions, they exercise their influence on society when they accept or reject lawyers' arguments about new meanings of words.
Do you think this trend of changing the old meanings of words is also the trend of lawyers having more power in, in this society by way of having this position where they can argue new meanings, different meanings of what the society had agreed to before?
Pulat, that's a great question, not an easy question to answer, and I think the way I would approach it is like this. First, language is not static. Language changes. New usages come into fashion. Anyone who's the parent of teenagers, as my wife and I now are, realize that, you know, new terms come into the language virtually every day. New technologies like text messaging change the way we use language. But there's no doubt that lawyers have played a role in that. And I think that there has been an increasing consciousness about the way that the choice of language can be political. Think about all the fights about pronouns and the like. But it also can be really important in just the craft of lawyering, figuring out how to characterize an argument.
You know, the arguments for same-sex marriage seemed to get stronger when the advocates stopped talking about gay marriage and started talking about marriage equality. And that isn't, you know, the alteration of the meaning of terms so much as it is the use of particular terms in order to advance an argument. And after all, what is an argument other than just a collection of words? And so I think there's no doubt that lawyers have had an influence. You think about something like marriage equality, that's a term that probably you know, first popped up in a brief and then became a very common phrase in the broader political discourse. And that sort of thing happens all the time.
And often people don't notice it. It just sort of happens, you know, almost subconsciously. And, you know, a certain degree of that is natural and to be expected. I certainly would never argue that the meaning of a term should be frozen in the original meaning of the term when it was first used, and that we should all just go back to the Oxford English Dictionary and find the first usage and never use a term to mean anything else, because there are so many terms that have become richer because they have acquired additional meanings. And so, and I think Justice Scalia would probably agree with that, even though at the same time he would bemoan the fact that people aren't as appreciative of the way in which terms develop and evolve.
I want to return to your career path. I know that you went to Kirkland& Ellis after clerking for Justice Scalia, and this was your first law job. I mean, outside of clerking, outside of any jobs you held in law school. What was it like? I mean, did you already know that you wanted to be an appellate litigator?
So I didn't, and I went to Kirkland& Ellis just 5 blocks down the road from where I'm sitting now, largely because I wanted to go somewhere where I could figure out what sort of litigator I wanted to be. And after clerking in particular, I knew that there was some chance I might want to be an appellate litigator. And Kirkland was then one of the relatively few firms that had a dedicated appellate practice. And as it turned out, and as you alluded to in the introduction, Ken Starr had just come back to the firm after having been the independent counsel investigating President Clinton. And many of the people who he worked with, such as a young lawyer by the name of Brett Kavanaugh, had, you know, gone on to do other things or, you know, did not come back to the firm after he returned.
And so there were tremendous opportunities for young lawyers to come into the practice and get a lot of responsibility very quickly. And while I was not certain I wanted to be an appellate lawyer when I joined the firm, I pretty quickly figured out that I really enjoyed working on appeals. And a large part of that was simply because I really enjoyed working with Ken. He was one of the most important, if not the most important mentor in my career and somebody with whom I had a very close working relationship. And, you know, I think everyone who is even modestly successful in any line of work can identify some mentor who was critical both in terms of just developing skills, but also in terms of being a real advocate in opening doors and finding opportunities.
And Ken was definitely that for me.
I just realized you spent your entire career in DC, correct?
I have. No, it's been pretty boring. I've worked within basically a 10-block radius for the last 25 years. It's really hard to believe.
Yeah, you're on K Street right now, and you're probably within walking distance of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Yeah, it would be a healthy walk, but you could definitely do it on a nice day. And it's funny because I am on K Street now. That's K Street in the background for those who are watching on video. And it's funny because I had never previously worked on K Street. And I know that every city, Toronto is one of them, has a sort of famous street where all the lawyers are. It turns out in Washington, actually, not many of the lawyers are on K Street. But I'll never forget the first time I was described in an article as a K Street lawyer. And I thought to myself, oh, it's actually accurate now.
You know, you spoke very warmly of Ken Starr as your mentor. What was the biggest lesson you learned from Ken Starr?
He was really an extraordinarily humble man. And there's a lot of false humility in this town, but he was the real deal. And he was always great about sharing credit with younger lawyers with whom he worked. And, you know, just an extraordinary mentor in that way, really extraordinary at sort of pushing forward the younger lawyers who he worked with. And it's no accident that when you think about famous mentors in the Washington legal community, Ken was a mentor to Brett Kavanaugh and Paul Clement and to me and to so many others. And I'm not sure that there's anybody who has a comparable coaching tree, to use one of our expressions, in terms of the people who he mentored who then went on to successful careers in their own right.
And the other thing I really learned from Ken was, I'll never forget, Ken pulled me aside relatively early in my career, and I think he was kind of cutting me down a notch in doing this because he said to me, you know, Kannon, you know, you went to all these fancy schools. I went to GW, George Washington University, right around the corner from here. And then I went to Duke for law school, which is a great law school. But, you know, it's not Harvard or Yale, but it's in that next category. And And he said, you know, and I'm up against all these people who went to Harvard like you did, or Yale. And, you know, I learned very early on that I was never going to be smarter than them.
But what I really needed to do was to outwork them. And that was a really powerful lesson for me. It was sort of that moment where I realized, yeah, everybody else who I'm competing against— and I use that term loosely— is somebody who has exactly the same credentials. You know, they're all people who went to fancy schools and got great clerkships. And the only way that I'm going to be, quote unquote, better than them is by working harder than that. And that was something that I took very seriously then. It's something I take very seriously now. You know, there's never a stage in a legal career where you can mail it in. You know, with every new argument, you've got to learn the case forward and backwards.
You've got to do the dirty work to be ready. And, you know, there's never a point at which you can just go into court and say, you know, I've been here before, just trust me. And that's something that I take very, very seriously.
You know, you just started talking about it and I want to continue this thread. What is the Shanmugam method? What is the Shanmugam method in the Supreme Court of the United when you argue in the Supreme Court of the United States? What is the Shanmugam method when you review the new case? What is the Shanmugam method when you argue in appellate courts? What is the Shanmugam method?
I don't think I'm successful enough to have a method yet, so maybe one day I'll aspire to that. But, you know, I'd say that there are two things that hopefully are sort of hallmarks of the way that I approach the task of advocacy, whether it's written advocacy or oral advocacy. The first is just being prepared. I just think that it is unforgivable when you see a lawyer who doesn't really know the record or who clearly hasn't really read the cases. And look, everybody can be surprised by a question sometimes. But, you know, the way I like to think about my career is I hope that I can go years between saying, "I don't know," in open court.
And that is just a result of preparation. And again, it's just a lot of hard work. And sometimes it's Saturday mornings and even Sunday mornings before church in the office. And that just kind of comes with the territory. And if you want to be good at this, you've got to be prepared. But the other thing, and I think this is something that I learned during my time at the Justice Department, is having a reputation for being a straight shooter, for being candid, for acknowledging the weaknesses in your position, but explaining why you should win despite those weaknesses. You know, first and foremost, being an officer for the court, while, of course, being a zealous advocate for your client.
And I'd like to think that when people listen to my arguments, they always think he played it straight. He did not try to sugarcoat things. He made the very best arguments that he could. Well, not in any way hiding the ball, to mix my metaphors. And that's something that I really take very seriously. And that's something I really try to inculcate in the younger lawyers with whom I work.
You know, you argue cases in front of 9 very different people, different age, different gender, different career paths. Of course, they all have something in common. Also, is there a psychological profile of a Supreme Court of the United States Justice? Is there such a thing?
They're all incredibly smart and incredibly successful, and they share the traits of successful people. But as you say, Pulat, they all come from different backgrounds. We don't have the same rules that you do in terms of having justices who, you know, come from an English-speaking background and a French-speaking background, having representation from you know, across the country. I think actually one of the fairest criticisms of our Supreme Court in recent years is that it has not been all that geographically diverse. And even the quote-unquote geographically diverse justices have spent a healthy chunk of their career here or in one of the other big cities. And I think that's actually sometimes a little bit of a problem.
But, you know, they are all smart. I mean, we have not really had a justice who is not up to snuff, certainly in my career. And maybe people say I'm just saying that, but truly, I think that that's true. Whereas you can go back in American history and find no shortage of Supreme Court justices who truly could not do the job. And so, you know, it's a real privilege in some sense to be arguing before, you know, a branch of government that is functioning well, that has really talented people. And, you know, they do come from different backgrounds to some extent. And it's very important to be aware of that. And of course, to be aware of their jurisprudential differences.
But one of the things I love about arguing in the Supreme Court in particular is, you know, other than with retirements and other changes in membership, it's the same people every time. You know who you're going to get. One of the great challenges of my job is that most of my work, and this is true for most quote-unquote Supreme Court advocates, is work in the lower courts where, you know, you're getting 3 judges from courts that may have you know, 13 or 15, or in the case of the Ninth Circuit, you know, more than 25 judges. And you don't often know until shortly before the argument who those judges are going to be. And so in some sense, you have much less familiarity than you do on the Supreme Court.
Is the Supreme Court work your ideal work? Would you rather do only the Supreme Court of the United States work and no other work?
I think there are some Supreme Court advocates who would say that the answer to that is yes. And my answer to that is definitely no. I love litigating. I love just being in court. And if you told me, you know, sorry, Kannon, this is going to be a year where you're going to do nothing but arguments in, you know, random municipal courts around the country, I'd say, that's great, bring it on. Because a good day for me is a day when I'm in court arguing about something. And as long as the judge is engaged and as long as the subject matter is interesting for one reason or another, I don't really mind where it is.
Now, you know, is there a special privilege in arguing before the Supreme Court? Absolutely. And I hope that privilege never gets old and arguing before the Supreme Court never gets old. But if you ask me whether I'm more excited by, you know, my next Supreme Court argument or by, you know, appearing in a court that I've never appeared in before, I'd probably say the latter. I think it's fun to go into new courts. It's fun to appear in front of judges who I've never had the chance to appear in front of. For many, many years, I had never drawn the famous Judge Guido Calabresi on the Second Circuit on one of my panels, and I finally got to argue in front of Judge Calabresi.
He was well past 90 by the time I got him on a panel, and that was just a treat because he was someone who I always wanted to have the chance to appear in front of. And, and so that's kind of how I feel about it. You know, it's The great thing about the Supreme Court is chances are that the case is going to be interesting because almost by definition, if it's one of the few cases our Supreme Court hears, it's going to be interesting for some reason or another.
You said that you liked arguing in front of new judges and new courts, but is there a court you have never actually argued in before? Is there even such a court? You argued in all circuits of the United States Court of Appeals, correct?
Yeah, that's right. There are many, many state supreme courts that I've never argued in front of. So I suppose in theory I could try to hit all 50 state supreme courts, but I think that's probably verging on the impossible. I'm not sure that anyone has ever done that. But that would be neat in part because it would be a good excuse to get around to the rest of the country. You know, one of the things I love about what I do that may not be as obvious is that my job takes me literally to every corner of this great country. And, you know, I've now been to all 50 states, and most of those, frankly, were for work.
And, and that's one of the really neat things is getting to argue cases. You know, I got to argue a case in Hawaii earlier this year, and it's just so neat because it really drives home what an incredible and diverse country this is.
I wonder if the zeitgeist is different in different parts of the country. So Hawaii versus, for example, South Carolina. When I say zeitgeist, I mean the general feeling of the social consensus of what the issues are, of what the issues should be, how the issues should be resolved and things like that. I mean, these are almost different countries in a sense, in a cultural sense sometimes, right? Do you feel that when you cross those state lines? Or work?
I mean, I think that you do get a sense of just how diverse the country is, but I'd say that it's a lot broader than just political polarization. And there's been a lot written about two countries and blue states versus red states, but I think there's a lot more to it than that. And, you know, if you go to, you know, Miami, it's just a completely different vibe from Seattle, even though, you know, the cities themselves might have you know, some political similarities. And I think that that just reflects the fact that it is such a diverse country and, and not so much by language, because of course we have one now official language.
It's more just that culturally there are such deep variations. And I often say to my European friends who will often tease us Americans for not having traveled abroad very much. You know, the distance from like Seattle to Miami is probably like the distance from like London to Istanbul. And yet it's a single country. And, you know, I never cease to be kind of amazed by that. And I never cease to be amazed by the fact that the things that people care about here in Washington are typically not things that people are particularly obsessed about outside the Beltway. Much less in the further-flung parts of the country.
You worked for the government after 3 or almost 4 years at Kirkland& Ellis. You went to the Department of Justice, specifically to the Solicitor General's office, and you worked as an assistant to Solicitor General for more than 4 years. And for our Canadian viewers, The Solicitor General is basically an office within the Department of Justice that, that does nothing but argue Supreme Court of the United States cases for the United States government. And correct me if I'm wrong. So all you did is argue, argue in the Supreme Court of the United States. Does that sound fair?
Yeah, the job responsibilities are a little bit broader because the Solicitor General, among other things, authorizes any appeal that the government wants to take, even in the lower courts. But in terms of courtroom appearances, I made 8 courtroom appearances in the Solicitor General's office, and each of them was for the United States in the Supreme Court of the United States. And so that is by far the biggest and most visible part of the job.
And what did working for the government teach you that working in the private sector didn't?
You know, I think that the Solicitor General's Office has long had an ethos of fairness, of wanting to be that honest broker that I referred to earlier as the consummate repeat player before the Supreme Court. I think the Solicitor General's Office enjoys something of a special relationship with the court. The Solicitor General is often referred to as the 10th Justice because he or she is someone who the court particularly trusts to be a straight shooter and an honest broker. And, you know, that was something that I definitely learned when I was in the office. And there were some legendary lawyers, people like Ed Needler and Michael Dreeben and Geoff Manier and Irv Gornstein and so many others who had been there for really significant chunks of their career.
Who were really great role models for those values, and I learned so much from working with them.
It's interesting. So when you work at the Department of Justice, your ultimate boss is a political appointment. So US attorneys US attorneys general are appointed by the president of the United States. Today the attorney general is Pam Bondi. And she is the ultimate boss of the United States Solicitor General. So when president— presidential administrations change, and I know that you worked during your entire tenure, the president was George W. Bush, if I'm not mistaken. When presidential administrations change, is there a wave of change below the political appointment level, on the level of counsel, of lawyers who work in the department? Or are they not affected by that at all?
So I think historically the answer to that question was no. And I think perhaps not coincidentally, there was a great deal of continuity in the positions the government would take from administration to administration. I think that has changed, and I think it's changed in a relatively bipartisan way, though I think in this moment, as we're talking, In 2025, there is a particular focus on that with the, the second Trump administration coming in and really making quite clear that it wants to have a, a pretty firm hold on the positions that are being taken and really has little room for lawyers deviating from those positions. I think that's probably a fair way of describing what's been going on so far in this administration.
And I think there's always been a little bit of a tension between, on the one hand, the fact that the Solicitor General's Office and other components of the Justice Department are, of course, part of the executive branch. They report indirectly all the way up to the president through the Attorney General. But on the other hand, there is, you know, I think a strong a cultural sense that a lot of the work that the Justice Department does is apolitical. And there's been a norm that politics should not interfere too much in the operation of law enforcement. And I think there's always been some tension between those norms. And right now what you're seeing is a very strong sense that the political norms should be prevailing.
And that's causing a lot of the things that I think many of us are reading about in the newspapers.
I want to talk a little bit about your work as a law firm leader. I assume you are a member of a hiring committee of some sort and you participate in the selection of junior lawyers, in the selection of partners and so on. Paul Weiss is a global law firm with a blue-chip history, blue-chip clients, blue-chip cases. What are your standards like? So if, for example, a law student today is watching this interview and wants to apply to Paul Weiss, what should that law student know? How do you choose students that work for you or lawyers that work for you? Talk about that a little, please. Well,
if a law student is still watching this interview, it may be because they're interested in Paul Weiss. And so I always say that Having excellent accomplishments, credentials is important. And without a doubt, the people who we interview tend to be people who've done very well in law school and often done very well before law school as well. I always say that that's important, but it's not sufficient. And really, I think what we're looking for is people who are enthusiastic, people who are passionate about the law, who have a genuine interest in the work that we do and are not coming here just because it's a way of earning a paycheck after many years of education, but who genuinely want to come and serve our clients, but also to learn how to be a really good lawyer.
And, you know, it's one of the most important things that someone can say in an interview in some sense when they say, I want to come to the firm because I want to learn how to handle I want to learn how to argue, or I want to learn how to take a deposition, because that is what early years at a law firm do. And I think it's very important to have that desire and that enthusiasm. And you would be surprised— maybe you wouldn't be surprised, but I think you'd be surprised at how often I come away from an interview with a sense of this is a really impressive person, but they have just totally not made the case as to why we should hire them.
And it's just really important, I think, in an interview to do that because, again, as I said about my own time as an associate, the people we're interviewing have incredible credentials, but they're competing against a bunch of people who also have incredible credentials. And it's very important to kind of make the case as to why you should be the one who gets hired.
You know, you have accomplished so much. Is there anything else to do? What do you want to do next? If you were to think like a law school graduate today, or someone thinking about his future, what is left to do? What is, what is Kannon Shanmugam going to do next in his career?
Well, it's funny because you know, I think that when you're younger, you have very well-defined career goals. And there was definitely a time when I thought, you know, boy, I'd like to argue a case in the Supreme Court. And then I did that. And maybe even after that, I thought, well, I'd like to argue a second time in the Supreme Court. But now I no longer really have those sorts of finite goals, or at least well-defined goals. I would say that I have kind of two goals. I mean, the first is that I really love doing what I do, and I'm fortunate enough now to be gray-haired enough that, you know, it's not like I have to keep doing this for any particular period of time.
I do it because I love it. I love arguing. I love the next case. And I have no idea, Pulat, what my next case is going to be 5 years from now, because appellate cases tend to move pretty quickly. I probably couldn't tell you what I'm going to be arguing the year after next at all. But what I can tell you is that whatever that next case is, it still really excites me and I still really enjoy it in perhaps a different way from when I was doing it for the first time. In some sense, maybe I enjoy it more now that I'm no longer scared of the whole enterprise and really can kind of enjoy actually doing the arguments and working on the briefs.
But that continues, and that for me is one of my goals. But I'll tell you the thing that I think more about as I get older is really working with the next generation and training the next generation of appellate lawyers, of litigators more generally. I think in many ways, when I think about someone like Ken Starr, I think that that's his legacy. I hope that that will be my legacy. And, you know, to hopefully pass a little bit on of what I learned from the people who came before me to the next generation, I think is the most important thing. And I think all the time about how I'm going to leave this practice in a better place than it was when I found it.
Now, the good news was that because we started it, it was starting from zero. So hopefully that will happen. But but at the same time, you know, I really want the practice here at Paul Weiss to be something that continues long after I'm gone. So I spend a lot of time thinking about that and I hope to leave the appellate bar in the US more generally in a better place by virtue of my time as playing a relatively small part in it. So I think those are the things that I really think about. But above all, I just consider myself very fortunate to have a job where I get out of bed every morning and I'm really excited to come to work.
Well, Kannon, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation.
It was my pleasure, Pulat. Thanks for having me.