Leonard Leo had a vision for his alma mater, and he had the money to back it up. With a donation of as much as $25 million, he wanted Cornell Law to establish the Center for the Study of the Structural Constitution — the biggest effort yet by the conservative megadonor to reshape academia in his right-wing image.
After months of courtship, the proposal — which has before never been disclosed — hit a snag in the fall of 2021.
Cornell professors worried a center sponsored by Leo, one of the architects of the conservative legal movement, would establish a beachhead for far-right scholarship. Unable to convince the school that gave him both his undergraduate and law degrees to build his research center, Leo walked away, or so he claims.
But he didn’t abandon his law school campaign.
Snubbed by the Ivy League, Leo found a new home for his pet project. The Intercept followed the money trail to reveal how the man known primarily as the Trump administration’s “court whisperer” has secretly funneled part of his billion-dollar war chest to the law school at Texas A&M University. Money has also flowed to several other law schools through one of Leo’s favorite dark-money funds, with many donations bearing the hallmarks of his broader aim to overhaul the legal academy.
Professors at the law schools Leo targeted for shadow philanthropy — more than a dozen of whom spoke with The Intercept, most on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the discussions — are worried Leo is trying to incubate fringe conservative scholarship at top programs.
And many think he’s just getting started.
Students on Libe Slope at the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, N.Y., on April 11, 2023. Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesThe Double Cornellian
Leo is a Cornell man twice over, having finished his undergrad in 1987 and his J.D. from Cornell Law in 1989. After founding Cornell’s student chapter of the Federalist Society, he went on to become the national organization’s executive vice president and now co-chair. In the decades that followed, Leo advised on every conservative nomination to the Supreme Court since Chief Justice John Roberts.
On top of handpicking judges, Leo made himself a dominant fundraiser for conservative legal causes, especially efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade. During the Obama administration, groups linked to Leo spent millions to stonewall the nomination of then-Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. In 2018, Justice Clarence Thomas, a longtime friend, quipped Leo had made himself “the Number Three most powerful person in the world.”
In 2021, Leo orchestrated a historic $1.6 billion windfall for his primary dark-money vehicle, the Marble Freedom Trust, which he controls as chair. It was likely the largest donation to a political nonprofit ever.
Along the way to becoming one of the conservative legal movement’s chief architects and piggybanks, Leo honed his academic philanthropy chops too.
In 2016, Leo helped broker a $20 million anonymous gift to George Mason University in exchange for renaming its law school after the late Justice Antonin Scalia. This donation is widely suspected to be from the same donor who later gave Leo more than $1 billion.
An Intercept investigation reveals:
Right-wing megadonor Leonard Leo considered donating $25 million to Cornell Law School to establish a research center; the deal fell apart amid faculty opposition. Instead he secretly donated $15 million for a research center with a nearly identical name at Texas A&M School of Law, the university’s former president confirmed. Leo’s preferred donor-advised fund distributed millions to other law schools across the country to fund research centers and endowed professorships.Leo maintained a close relationship with Cornell over the decades, including during his time advising the Trump administration on judicial nominations, when he gave two talks at Cornell Law discussing his views on the “structural Constitution.” Cleverly bland and amorphous — much like “originalism” or “textualism” — a “structuralist” analysis of the Constitution can mean many things, including basic principles like separation of powers and federalism.
To many Cornell Law professors, however, a Leo-sponsored center devoted to the “structural Constitution” registered as a potential launchpad for right-wing legal theories at an elite, generally liberal institution. They saw it as an attempt to buy credibility for Leo’s broader, arch-conservative views, many of which have extraordinarily low support among legal scholars nationwide.
Leo first discussed a donation of up to $25 million with Cornell Law’s then-dean, Eduardo Peñalver, who stepped down in late 2020, according to a source close to Leo. The donation would have been among the largest in Cornell Law’s history. (Peñalver, now the president of Seattle University, did not respond to The Intercept’s inquiries.)
By fall 2021, the plan was put in writing. The source shared a copy of an undated proposal, which he said Cornell sent to Leo in October 2021.
Cornell declined to answer The Intercept’s questions about its discussions with Leo, including why the deal ultimately stalled. “We have many conversations with alumni and others around potential philanthropic gifts — conversations that are confidential,” the current Cornell Law dean, Jens David Ohlin, said in an emailed statement.
The proposal laid out the vision for the “Charles Evans Hughes Center for the Study of the Structural Constitution,” to be named for the Supreme Court’s chief justice during the New Deal. Hughes briefly served on Cornell’s faculty in the late 19th century, and, as the proposal highlights, he wrote a unanimous opinion gutting one of the New Deal’s legislative centerpieces.
According to the document, the center would be funded by Leo to the tune of $15 million over five years, with $5 million committed to an endowed chair. “This professor will be the intellectual heart of the center and the architect of its scholarly program,” per the proposal, which also floated a list of four “thinkers we would consider for the role.”
The center would have its own physical........