At the opening of jury selection last week, Judge Arun Subramanian, who is overseeing the Sean Combs case, made an observation about a list shown to prospective jurors that contained the names of celebrities that may come up at trial.
“I read through the people and places list, which is several pages long,” Judge Subramanian said at the beginning of the hearing. “I felt like I was reading an appendix from ‘The Lord of the Rings.’”
It was an unusual moment of levity during a serious criminal case — and a rare glimpse into the candid thoughts of Judge Subramanian, who has been a federal judge for only two years but is presiding over one of the most high-profile criminal trials in the country.
Nominated to the bench by President Biden in 2022, and confirmed by the Senate in March 2023, Judge Subramanian was born in Pittsburgh in 1979, to parents who emigrated from India in 1970.
After attending Case Western Reserve University, he earned his law degree from Columbia in 2004. He began building an impressive legal résumé, with clerkships under two federal judges in New York as well as under Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court. In 2007, he joined the law firm Susman Godfrey, and four years later, at age 31, became its youngest partner.
At Judge Subramanian’s confirmation hearing in late 2022, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, called him a “steadfast consumer protection expert” and said that his cases as a lawyer included defending victims of trafficking and child pornography. Judge Subramanian also developed a specialty in bankruptcy litigation.
In addition to overseeing the Combs criminal case, Judge Subramanian has been assigned the antitrust lawsuit against the concert giant Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster. In that case, which was filed last year and has a tentative trial date in 2026, prosecutors have called for a breakup of the company, which is by far the largest power in the live entertainment world.
He is also a judge who values efficiency in his courtroom. During jury selection for Mr. Combs’s trial, Judge Subramanian asked the prosecution and the defense to let him know when they needed to take breaks, because if they didn’t, he would “just keep going until we reach the finish line.”
“As you will come to see,” he said, “I’m a machine.”
Judge Subramanian is the first person of South Asian descent to be a judge in the Southern District of New York. “My father grew up in a small village,” he said at his confirmation hearing. “One generation later, his son is sitting before this honorable committee. That is the American dream.”
At a speech last year to Columbia Law alumni, faculty and students, he said that as “the new kid” on the bench, he hosted the first karaoke event in the Southern District’s 235-year history. “I did not know,” Judge Subramanian remarked, “that there was so much enthusiasm for karaoke on the Mother Court.”
