Sri Srinivasan Biography

Sri Srinivasan has been a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit since 2013.

Sri Srinivasan was born in India; his family moved to the United States when his father, math professor T.P. Srinivasan, won a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of California. After a brief return to India, the family emigrated to Lawrence, Kansas when Sri Srinivasan was four. He grew up in Kansas and attended Stanford University, earning a BA in 1989 and then both a law degree and MBA from Stanford in 1995.

He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and joined the corporate law firm of O’Melveny and Myers, then worked in the U.S. Solicitor General’s office from 2002-07. He then returned to O’Melveny and Myers as a partner, where among other cases he represented ExxonMobil and former Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling. In 2011 he went back to the Solicitor General’s office, this time as Principal Deputy Solicitor General.

Two years later, President Barack Obama appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was confirmed, 97-0, by the U.S. Senate and took his seat in May of 2013. In 2016, after the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Srinivasan was widely considered to be on Obama’s short list to replace Scalia. (ScotusBlog called Srinivasan “as moderate a judge as Republicans could expect a Democratic president to nominate,” and said “he seems likely to lean to the left, but still gravitate towards the center.”) However, President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland instead.