Kannon Shanmugam

In 2018, he argued on behalf of the appellees in Republic of Sudan v. Harrison before the Supreme Court. In 2020, he argued on behalf of Seila Law in the landmark case Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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. He graduated in 1998 with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude.

After graduating from law school, Shanmugam clerked from 1998 to 1999 for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, then clerked from 1999 to 2000 for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. After completing his clerkships, he joined 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. 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 attended Lawrence High School and graduated as co-valedictorian in 1989 at age 16. He then went to Harvard University, where he majored in Classics and was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Independent. He graduated from Harvard in 1993 with an A.B. summa cum laude. 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.

Kannon Kumar Shanmugam (born November 15, 1972) is an American lawyer known for his litigation at the U.S. Supreme Court. He has been a partner at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison since 2019, and is the managing partner of the firm's Washington office and chair of its Supreme Court and appellate practice group. Shanmugam has been mentioned as a potential judicial nominee and was mentioned as a candidate for Solicitor General in the administration of President Donald Trump.

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. His father, Kumarasamy "Sam" Shanmugam, was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Kansas for over 30 years.