In any given year, the United States Supreme Court hears only 80 or so cases. That means that — in a nation with more than 1.3 million attorneys — the group of lawyers who get to argue before the nine justices is an exclusive club. For years, it was Roy Katriel’s dream to gain access to that club. He would regularly trawl through the dockets of the country’s 13 federal appeals courts, looking for cases to latch onto that seemed ripe for Supreme Court review.
Katriel, who grew up in Venezuela but moved to Miami in 1983, had the immigrant’s zeal to succeed in his adopted homeland. After graduating from college at 18 and briefly pursuing a career in engineering, he became a lawyer. By 2004, he was running his own little law firm, its offices down the road from the beach in a San Diego suburb.
Until 2020, the closest Katriel had come to the Supreme Court was having written a so-called petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the justices to hear a case involving the federal rules of evidence. The court rejected his request, but Kannon Shanmugam, one of the country’s leading Supreme Court litigators, emailed Katriel to congratulate him on a petition that was “exceptionally well done.” That small act of kindness inspired Katriel to hunt for his next opportunity.
One day late in 2020, Katriel came across a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. It involved a $60 million lawsuit that Shkelzen Berisha, the son of Albania’s former strongman, filed in 2017 against Guy Lawson, a journalist in New York. Berisha accused Lawson and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, among others, of having defamed him in a book called “Arms and the Dudes” that linked Berisha to organized crime and illicit ammunition sales. (He denies any such ties.) A federal judge dismissed Berisha’s lawsuit, finding that Lawson’s reporting, even if it turned out to be inaccurate, was protected under the First Amendment. In September 2020, a three-judge appeals panel upheld the lower court’s ruling.
When Katriel first read the 11th Circuit’s decision, it seemed open-and-shut. Starting in 1964 with its landmark decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court had made it hard for those in the public eye to win defamation cases. To prevail, they had to prove that the defendant knew that what they were publishing was false or had acted with reckless disregard as to its accuracy — a standard that has come to be known as “actual malice.”