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

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