Scott Stewart

Scott Stewart is a former Trump DOJ official and the current Mississippi solicitor general. While he was solicitor general, Mississippi began allowing religious exemptions for vaccinations that children must receive before attending day care or school. Stewart is most known for arguing the Dobbs case before SCOTUS where he successfully urged the court to overturn Roe v. Wade—taking away Americans’ federal constitutional protections for accessing abortion healthcare. Stewart argued that case alongside Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Project 2025 Advisory Board member, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group.

Stewart worked directly with ADF on the Dobbs litigation strategy and pushed for overturning Roe rather than defending the state’s law under Roe’s viability analysis. According to ADF’s Erin Hawley, who is married to Sen. Josh Hawley, Stewart addressed the table of ADF lawyers and said, “The people of Mississippi are pro-life […]They enacted this law. It is my duty to defend it to the best of my ability, and the right thing to do is to ask the court to overrule Roe.”

When he filed the brief on behalf of Mississippi, he directly attacked nearly fifty years of precedent. He claimed, “Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong…”

Stewart clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been in the news repeatedly for his alleged corruption, lack of ethics, and for his spouse, Ginni’s, role in trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Stewart also clerked for Diarmuid O’Scannlain who was appointed by Ronald Reagan to the Ninth Circuit and who has had his share of controversial rulings, including finding Seattle police did not use excessive force when they tasered a visibly pregnant woman.

Stewart also worked for the Department of Justice in the Trump administration where he was at the center of another abortion controversy. In 2017, an undocumented 17-year old, who was staying in a federal refugee shelter in Texas, needed abortion healthcare. The pregnant child had obtained a court order allowing her the procedure, but Stewart, in defense of a Trump administration order, refused to let her leave the shelter. Stewart made the argument that there was no “undue burden” on the minor and “she can get relief with voluntary departure” from the United States. A federal judge disagreed and the minor was allowed to get the abortion she wanted.

Stewart was left jobless following Trump’s 2020 defeat and Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch was in need of a solicitor general. Fitch reached out to Stewart after seeing his name “tucked into a pile of resumes from the Republican Attorneys General Association [RAGA].” RAGA’s largest funder is Leonard Leo’s network, which has given millions to the group over the years. Fitch also has direct financial ties to Leo.

When Stewart got the job as solicitor general a friend called to congratulate Stewart— Misha Tseytlin. Tseytlin, former solicitor general of Wisconsin, reportedly came up with the tactic (at Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society cocktail hour) of having the Supreme Court examine Roe’s viability rule, by having a state create legislation that imposed an earlier ban on abortions.

Stewart and Tseytlin worked together at Gibson Dunn, a Big Law firm that has represented multinational corporations like Apple, Chevron, CNN, Dole, Intel, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and NBC. Over the years, its lawyers have been sanctioned for falsifying evidence and witness tampering. The Leonard Leo-tied Judicial Education Project (now called The 85 Fund) has also paid the firm more than $900,000 in 2018 and 2019 for legal services.

Stewart is listed as a Federalist Society contributor. The Federalist Society is a network of right-wing lawyers that serves as a pipeline to power as judges and more; Leonard Leo, the man who engineered the right-wing faction of the Supreme Court, helps lead the Federalist Society as co-chair of its board.

This profile has been updated.