Leonard Leo

• Born: 1965

Leonard Leo was the executive vice president of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. Most commonly referred to as the Federalist Society, the organization, headquartered in Washington, DC, is composed primarily of lawyers who advance ideas and policies aimed at limited constitutional government. The organization was started in 1982 by students at the University of Chicago Law School and Yale Law School. The faculty adviser at the University of Chicago was Antonin Scalia, and the adviser at Yale was Robert Bork. While the organization grew on law school campuses through the 1980s, it was Leo, who joined the organization in 1991, who transformed the Federalist Society into the nationally significant power that it is today. Leo left the organization in 2020 but remained co-chair of the board of directors.

Leo was born in Long Island, New York. His father died when he was young, and his mother remarried when he was five. Shortly after the new marriage, the family moved to New Jersey. Leo attended Cornell University for both his undergraduate and legal studies. As a law student, he interned with Senator Orrin Hatch, a member of the judiciary committee. His experience there influenced his future plans.

After college, he married Sally Schroeder. They had seven children, although his first daughter was born with spina bifida and died due to health complications associated with the disease when she was just fourteen. Inspired by his daughter, Leo drew deeper into his Catholic faith and became ardently pro-life. His daughter’s passing only made his opposition to abortion stronger.

In 1991, Leo joined the Federalist Society, which had been growing through the 1980s on campuses of law schools across the nation. However, there was not much interaction among members after graduation. It was Leo who helped create the Lawyers chapters in cities across the United States. In the first decade of its existence, the Federalist Society grew from two student chapters to more than 90 chapters and from an operating budget of just $100,000 to a budget over $1.6 million. In 2017, it had an operating budget of over $10 million and claimed over 40,000 members. By 2024, the group had 90,000 members and an operating budget of over $20 million. Its corporate donors included Chevron and Google, and conservative funders like Charles and David Koch have been tied to the organization.

The creation of Lawyers chapters was responsible for transforming the organization from a student group interested in esoteric and marginal constitutional questions into a national organization that radically changed legal thought in the late twentieth century. The Federalist Society promoted a conservative approach to constitutional interpretation known as originalism. That is, judges should solely focus on the original intent of the framers at the writing of the Constitution and that contemporary judges’ understandings of the law must be limited to common understandings of the late eighteenth century. By focusing on original intent, conservative legal scholars and practitioners hoped to limit constitutional protections on issues such as gay rights, abortion, women’s rights, handgun bans, and government regulations. While the organization does not sponsor candidates and does contribute to campaigns, it instead shapes and promotes ideas, trains lawyers, and provides networking for members.

The potential of the Federalist Society’s network was evident early on. Attorney General Edwin Meese, who served from 1985 to 1988, was an early supporter of the Federalist Society and recruited members for positions in the Justice Department of the Ronald Reagan administration. Later, Lee Liberman Otis, a founder of the Federalist society, served in the George H.W. Bush administration and further advanced members in key White House judicial roles. Meese and Otis, as well as Reagan and Bush, all promoted conservatives and Federalist Society members at all levels of the judiciary. The George W. Bush administration also had several influential Federalist society members like Brett Kavanaugh and Viet D. Dinh who placed conservative justices at all levels. Nearly half of George W. Bush’s appointees to the courts of appeals were Federalist Society members.

The appointment of Federalist members to the lower levels of the court was important. Their lower level decisions impacted the cases that would head to the Supreme Court but also provided the legal and precedential foundations for later court rulings. The network of Federalist Society judges were most influential in cases where the Supreme Court would eventually break from prevailing legal precedent. Their decisions at the lower court level, their growing influence in law schools and publications in law reviews, and their legal briefs all provided intellectual support for dramatic legal transformations. It was the intellectual capital fostered through the Federalist Society that helped create a pipeline of conservative Supreme Court justices and supplied them with the necessary foundation to justify their revolutionary constitutional decisions.

For example, the Federalist Society helped promote the personal rights view of the Second Amendment that guaranteed the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. In the 1970s, this view was on the fringes of constitutional interpretation. By the 1990s, Federalist Society judges wrote legal decisions and lawyers wrote legal journal articles promoting their perspective to the point that it proliferated among various levels of the judiciary across the country, even while popular opinion opposed it. In the early 2000s, members promoted the framework for the watershed decision in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that money in politics was tantamount to free speech. The ruling ushered in a new era of wealthy donors who could, almost, singlehandedly influence local, state, and national elections.

With Leo at the helm, the Federalist Society has been responsible for the remaking of the Supreme Court and the judiciary across the nation, giving it a conservative political bent. In 2017, Leo and the Federalist Society were responsible for getting a third of the Supreme Court nominated (including Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts). It was Leo who coordinated the outside campaigns to assure their Senate confirmations. He was in charge of preparing the nominees’ answers for senators’ questions. In 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump released a list of possible nominees to the Supreme Court put together by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Trump invited Leo to assemble the list himself. Making good on his promise, Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch in 2017, a judge who was on his list, and it was Leo who prepared Gorsuch for his Senate confirmation. Leo also advised Trump on his selections of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and Amy Coney Barrett in 2020 for open positions on the High Court.

Leo continued to donate money to advance conservative causes into the 2020s. According to Politico in 2023, Leo's activism through the Teneo Network was geared toward ending liberal dominance in business, politics, journalism, and education. The Teneo Network was a member of the advisory board of Project 2025, a collection of right-wing policies intended to reshape the US government.

In 2024, Leo became caught up in an ongoing Congressional ethics investigation concerning gifts and travel given to the Supreme Court justices. In April 2024, Leo was subpoenaed by Congressional Democrats and ordered to provide documents to the investigating committee. Leo called the subpoena “politically motivated” and refused to comply.

Besides making the Federalist Society into a powerful force, Leo also served in key political positions, taking sabbaticals from the organization from time to time. He served as a key strategist for George W. Bush in his 2004 reelection campaign and has served as the national co-chair of Catholic Outreach for the Republican National Committee. Bush appointed him to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, where he served two terms as chair. Leo also served as a delegate to the United Nations Council and United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Leo resigned from his position as executive vice president of the Federalist Society in 2020. According to the Washington Post in 2019, prior to his resignation, the organization paid him a salary that often exceeded $400,000.

Baum, Lawrence, and Neal Devins. “Federalist Court.” Slate, 31 Jan. 2017, slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/01/how-the-federalist-society-became-the-de-facto-selector-of-republican-supreme-court-justices.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Boburg, Shawn, and Robert O'Harrow, Jr. "Five Takeaways from the Post's Report on Leonard Leo." The Washington Post, 21 May 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/five-takeaways-from-the-posts-report-on-leonard-leo/2019/05/20/c547954c-78e9-11e9-b3f5-5673edf2d127‗story.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Fritze, John, and Devan Cole. "Senate Democrats Subpoena Leonard Leo in Supreme Court Ethics Probe." CNN, 11 Apr. 2024, www.cnn.com/2024/04/11/politics/leonard-leo-subpoena-supreme-court-ethics-probe/index.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Kroll, Andy, Andrea Bernstein, and Ilya Marritz. “We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority.” ProPublica, 11 Oct. 2023, www.propublica.org/article/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-leo-supreme-court-supermajority. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Toobin, Jeffrey. “The Conservative Pipeline to the Supreme Court.” The New Yorker, 10 Apr. 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/the-conservative-pipeline-to-the-supreme-court. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.