Thomas Brejcha: President and Chief Counsel

Tom Brejcha brings over 35 years of legal experience to his work as president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Society, and has been fighting court battles for pro-lifers for over 21 years.

Tom grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, graduating from Mt. Carmel H.S. and then from the University of Notre Dame, where he drafted the school’s first honor code and won a President’s Medallion from Fr. Hesburgh. He was a Root-Tilden Scholar and Executive Board Editor of the Law Review at New York University Law School.

Serving as an Army Captain in Vietnam from 1969-70, Tom won a Bronze Star and Army Commendation Medal. After studying on the G.I. Bill at the Sorbonne in Paris, Tom joined a Chicago law firm led by Barnabas F. Sears, who was then Special Prosecutor investigating police shootings of Black Panther leaders. Tom went on to become a successful business litigator in antitrust, securities, and labor cases—including two cases that reached the Supreme Court.

NOW v. Scheidler—A Landmark Case

Since 1986 Tom has served as lead defense counsel for Joseph Scheidler and three other defendants in the landmark federal “RICO” lawsuit, NOW v. Scheidler. This national class action suit was filed by the National Organization for Women (”NOW”) and the nation’s many abortion providers, who tried to apply federal antitrust, racketeering (”RICO”), and extortion laws against peaceable, nonviolent pro-life activism.

The case grew into a sprawling, epic-scale marathon that went before the U.S. Supreme Court three times. The high Court ruled 8–1 for the pro-lifers in 2003, then had to hear the case a third time, finally rejecting all claims 8–0, in February 2006.

Under Tom’s leadership, Thomas More Society has been involved in many other pivotal pro-life cases, representing the Catholic Conference and other groups in prompting the Illinois Supreme Court to revive the parental notice law, defending an ACLU appeal of the use of the wrongful death law to redress the loss of frozen embryos by an in vitro lab, appealing a $20,000 fine against a “conscientious objector” pharmacist in Wisconsin, winning the right to show The Nativity Story and erect an Easter cross on Daley Plaza, and both suing for and defending pro-lifers in Rockford, Davenport, Bridgeview, Mundelein, Granite City, South Bend, Miami, Birmingham, Syracuse, Los Angeles, Columbus, Twin Cities, Sioux Falls, Detroit, and elsewhere, as well as filing amicus briefs defending marriage for the national office of the Knights of Columbus in Iowa, Connecticut and California.

TMS has scored major wins in First Amendment cases before the Minnesota Supreme Court (7–0) and in federal district court in Chicago for “choose life” specialty license plates in Illinois. TMS is currently engaged in four lawsuits opposing Planned Parenthood’s new facility in Aurora, Illinois.