Charter Member Amit Agarwal to Argue Slaughter Case Before Supreme Court

Today, Society for the Rule of Law Charter Member Amit Agarwal argues before the Supreme Court on behalf of the respondent, former U.S. Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.

Agarwal is currently special counsel for the nonprofit Protect Democracy, and he holds extensive experience working for both the Department of Justice and as a clerk for several U.S. Supreme Court justices. He first clerked for then-Judge Samuel Alito on the Third Circuit and then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit, before clerking for Justice Alito at the Supreme Court. He then served in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in Washington, D.C., under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Later, he became an Assistant U.S. Attorney, then deputy chief of the Appellate Division, for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida. He went on to serve as Florida’s Solicitor General (2016–2021), then joined Holland & Knight’s D.C. office as a partner, and now works as special counsel at Protect Democracy.

Today, in Trump vs. Slaughter, Agarwal defends the longstanding “for-cause” protections limiting presidential removal of FTC commissioners. He urges the Court not to overrule Humphrey’s Executor, arguing that allowing presidents to fire independent-agency officials at-will would be a constitutional overreach that undermines Congress’s design, threatens the independence and quasi-judicial role of agencies like the FTC, and departs from a genuinely conservative respect for institutional stability and precedent. Instead of embracing an expansive “unitary executive” theory, he asks the justices to preserve the balance that prevents presidents from weaponizing removal power over independent regulators.

Agarwal has spoken about these issues directly at the recent Society for the Rule of Law Summit, the video of which can be viewed here.

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