Leonard Leo

Leonard Leo (born November 1965, Northport, New York, U.S.) is an influential American advocate and fundraiser for conservative legal causes and is cochair of the Federalist Society. He played key roles in helping Republican presidents select conservative judges to nominate to the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., John G. Roberts, Jr., Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Leo was an outspoken opponent of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which declared as unconstitutional unduly restrictive state regulations on abortion. His effort to create a conservative majority on the Court was instrumental in the overturning of the decision in 2022.

Early life and education

Leo was born on Long Island, New York, in an Italian American Roman Catholic family. His father, who owned a bakery, died of cancer early in Leo’s life. His mother remarried when he was five years old and the family moved to central New Jersey, where Leo grew up and attended Monroe Township High School. He credits his grandfather with being a formidable influence on his life. His grandfather immigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager, then worked his way up to become a clothing designer and executive at the American high-end brand Brooks Brothers. Leo told the Washington Examiner in a 2018 interview:

There’s no doubt that my experiences early on with my grandfather helped me to understand why America was exceptional and why the freedom that our Constitution provides is what ultimately leads people to goodness and to their purpose in life.

Leo attended Cornell University from 1983 to 1989, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and a law degree. He founded a chapter of the Federalist Society at Cornell Law School in 1986. The Federalist Society is a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers, legal scholars, judges, politicians, and law students that promotes right-wing causes in the American judiciary. It was founded in 1982, and its first faculty advisor at the University of Chicago was Antonin Scalia, the future Supreme Court justice. Scalia’s legal philosophy of originalism and textualism as methods of interpreting the U.S. Constitution became highly influential to Leo’s own ideas of jurisprudence.

Leo graduated from law school in 1989 and months later married Sally Schroeder, his high school sweetheart. The couple would have seven children. Their first child, Margaret, was born with spina bifida and died as a teenager.

Legal advocacy

In 1991 Leo and his wife moved to Washington, D.C., where he clerked for federal appellate judge Arthur Raymond Randolph. Also that year he began working full time for the Federalist Society’s national office, where he was tasked with creating a pipeline for advancing conservative lawyers to the federal judiciary. One of the group’s first paid employees, Leo eventually became its executive vice president and then cochair. Leo quickly made his mark on the Federalist Society. In a 2017 profile in The New Yorker, he explained the society’s strategy:

The key was to figure out how to develop what I call a “pipeline”— basically, where you recruit students in law school, you get them through law school, they come out of law school, and then you find ways of continuing to involve them in legal policy. So you have these chapters, you have practice groups, you have a pro-bono network, you have a media program—you find ways of engaging these lawyers so that they can still be involved.

Leo’s devout Catholic beliefs were another bedrock influence, and one of his main missions was overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion. “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo,” conservative activist Edward Whelan wrote in a National Review piece in 2016, six years before a Supreme Court that Leo helped shape reversed the precedent. Leo has been involved in numerous other projects and nonprofit organizations to support Catholic causes in politics and higher education.

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Leo’s political influence rose during the presidency of George H.W. Bush and expanded under his son Pres. George W. Bush. Leo helped rally support for Bush senior’s 1991 Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. At a 2018 Federalist Society event, Thomas quipped that Leo was “the Number Three most powerful person in the world.”

For George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, Leo worked as his Catholic strategist. In 2005 Leo led the effort for Bush to nominate John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court, replacing William Rehnquist. Later that same year, after Bush’s next Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, withdrew due to a lack of support, Leo played an instrumental role in choosing a replacement more palatable to conservatives: Samuel Alito. Bush appointed Leo to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2007, and Leo was its chair from 2009 until 2012. Under Bush he was also a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

During the U.S. presidential election of 2016, candidate Donald Trump invited Leo to lunch and asked him for names of potential Supreme Court nominees. The list helped the Republican win favor with conservative and evangelical voters. After Trump became president, Leo assisted in coming up with his three picks for the Court: conservatives Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Leo’s nonprofit funding network further aided in those nominees’ efforts to be appointed to the bench. These three justices played key roles in overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022 and helped steer the Court to the right in other matters of legal philosophy.

Fundraising activities

In the first decades of the 21st century, Leo became an influential fundraiser for conservative legal and cultural causes by working with a network of nonprofit groups, which are not required to disclose their donors. An analysis in 2019 in The Washington Post found that Leo and his allies raised more than $250 million in these so-called “dark money” donations between 2014 and 2017.

One of Leo’s nonprofit groups, the Marble Freedom Trust, received a massive donation in 2021, at the time the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. history. The money came from electronics manufacturing mogul Barre Seid, who sold 100 percent of the shares of his company, Tripp Lite, to the Marble Freedom Trust before the company was then sold to an Irish conglomerate for $1.65 billion. All the proceeds from the sale went to the Marble Freedom Trust. In a statement to The New York Times, Leo defended the donation as a way to keep up with liberal donors:

It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals.

Also in 2021 Leo embarked on a venture known as the Teneo Network, a private conservative group modeled on the Federalist Society’s “pipeline” model but expanded to other parts of society. By moving conservatives into fields of influence—such as business and finance, media and entertainment, technology, professional sports, and higher education—the primary goal of the group is to shift U.S. culture rightward. According to a March 2023 report about Teneo videos obtained by ProPublica and later amplified in Leo’s November 2024 interview with National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, he succinctly explained his objective with Teneo: “I want to crush liberal dominance.”