Chief Justice

Padmanabhan Srikanth "Sri" Srinivasan) is an American jurist and attorney serving as

the Chief United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit. The United States Senate confirmed Srinivasan by a vote of 97–0 on May
23, 2013. Before his confirmation, Srinivasan served as Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the
United States and has argued 25 cases before the United States Supreme Court. He has also
lectured at Harvard Law School.

In 2016, Srinivasan was considered by President Barack Obama as a potential nominee to

the Supreme Court of the United States.

Srinivasan was born in Chandigarh, India to Tamil Iyengar parents. His father,
Thirunankovil Padmanabhan Srinivasan, was from Mela Thiruvenkatanathapuram, a village
near Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu. Srinivasan's family first moved to the United States in the late
1960s when his father had a Fulbright fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. The
family briefly returned to India before finally immigrating to Lawrence, Kansas in the early
1970s when Srinivasan was four years old. His father was a professor of mathematics at
the University of Kansas, and his mother, Saroja, taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and later
worked at the University of Kansas computer science department. Srinivasan graduated
from Lawrence High School in Lawrence, where he played basketball, sharing the court with
future NBA star Danny Manning.

Srinivasan earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989 from Stanford University and then earned a

joint JD–MBA in 1995 from Stanford Law School and Stanford Graduate School of Business,
respectively.
After law school, Srinivasan worked as a law clerk for United States Court of Appeals for the
Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III and then was a clerk for United States Supreme
Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

After his clerkships, Srinivasan worked for the law firm O'Melveny & Myers and then joined the
office of the United States Solicitor General, where he worked from 2002 until 2007. 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 2005 he received the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award
for Excellence from the United States Department of Defense.

On August 26, 2011, Srinivasan was appointed to replace Neal Katyal as Principal Deputy
Solicitor General of the United States. As of May 2013, Srinivasan had argued 25 cases before
the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier in his career, he also performed pro bono work for presidential
candidate Al Gore during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election.

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, upon a 97–0 appointment to the Court of
Appeals for the D.C. Circuit