Sign Up

NCLA Site Search

Mark Chenoweth

President and Chief Legal Officer


NCLA’s President and Chief Legal Officer, Mark Chenoweth, has observed the administrative state up close and personal from perches in all four branches of the federal government. Mark served as the first chief of staff to Congressman Mike Pompeo, as legal counsel to Commissioner Anne Northup at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, and as a law clerk to the Hon. Danny J. Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Mark has worked in several different roles in the private sector as well. He began his legal career in D.C. as a regulatory associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. He then returned to his home state of Kansas to serve as in-house counsel for Koch Industries. Most recently he spent over four years as general counsel of the Washington Legal Foundation.

Mark is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Chicago Law School, where he co-founded the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship and became a Tony Patiño Fellow. Mark has been widely quoted and/or published in newspapers and websites including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New Hampshire Union Leader, and Metropolitan Corporate Counsel. He has also had recurring op-eds in the Los Angeles Daily Journal, and at Forbes.com.

Not licensed in Virginia; admitted to practice in Kansas, D.C., and select federal jurisdictions.

Suing Federal Agencies (Part One)
Suing Federal Agencies (Part Two)
On Chicago's Morning Radio

Unless Fixed Now, Ninth Circuit Case Granting Immunity For Police Theft Will Prove Hard To Unwind

By: Mark Chenoweth June 18, 2019
In the News
Wide consequences will stem from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s recent decision granting qualified immunity to several Fresno, California police officers sued for theft. These consequences will prove hard to unwind unless the court—as it should—rehears the case en banc and fixes it now. Imagine that a police officer, in the…
Read

Bump Stock Rule Puts Constitution In The Crosshairs

By: Mark Chenoweth March 1, 2019
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently warned Republicans that if a GOP president can declare a national emergency over a wall on the southern border, the next Democrat president could declare one over gun violence. Her threat envisioned future gun control actions without Congress. But that’s already happening—and it has made a shambles of…
Read

Forbes: Will Constitutional Defects With Administrative Law Judges Collapse The SEC's House Of Cards?

By: Mark Chenoweth December 3, 2018
In the News
“November 30, 2018 marked an obscure but important one-year anniversary. On that date, shortly after the Solicitor General had filed a brief confessing error in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Securities and Exchange Commission sought to fix the newly exposed defects in the unconstitutional appointments of its Administrative Law Judges (ALJs). But the purported “ratification” SEC…
Read