Chris Schandevel

Chris Schandevel serves as senior counsel on Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) appellate advocacy team. ADF is the world’s largest legal organization protecting religious freedom, free speech, the sanctity of life, marriage and family, and parental rights. He represents ADF clients at the appellate level, preserving lower-court victories and seeking to overturn unjust results.

Among other clients, he has represented a faith-based pregnancy resource center and adoption agency, a Christian photographer, a college student and conservative student group, a former Planned Parenthood clinic manager, women track-and-field athletes, and a high school French teacher. Schandevel also was on the team of attorneys who successfully represented the Thomas More Law Center in the U.S. Supreme Court. And he regularly represents clients in friend-of-the-court briefs filed in state and federal appellate courts and in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Before joining ADF, Schandevel served as an assistant attorney general in the criminal appeals section at the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia. During his five years in that office, Schandevel briefed and argued 14 appeals in the Supreme Court of Virginia and more than 60 appeals in the Court of Appeals of Virginia. Before his time at the Virginia attorney general’s office, Schandevel clerked for the Honorable Stephen R. McCullough on the Court of Appeals of Virginia.

Schandevel earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in. During law school, he founded a student organization called Advocates for Life at Virginia Law. He also completed ADF’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship and was commissioned as a Blackstone Fellow in 2010 after an internship with ADF’s Center for Life. Schandevel earned his bachelor’s degree in social work from Harding University in 2009.

A member of the state bar of Virginia, Schandevel is admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court and various state and federal trial and appellate courts.