Landmark Legal Foundation
Conservative legal foundation tied to Exxon, Koch, Scaife, Bradley and Searle money; joined the Advancing American Freedom-led coalition brief for Exxon and Suncor.
§ 1 · Background & fossil-fuel ties
The Landmark Legal Foundation’s (LLF) beginnings date back to 1976 in Kansas City, MO, when big business began astroturfing their own public interest movements. Exxon and oil money are tied up with the group from inception. Richard Mellon Scaife, whose inheritance was comprised in part of Gulf Oil money, was a founder of the National Legal Center, which started setting up organizations at the state level. Exxon and Texaco were early funders, according to the Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal. One of the organizations National Legal Center went on to find was LLF, then known as the Great Plains Legal Foundation.
Over the years, LLF has received funding from ExxonMobil, according to the Center for Climate Integrity. One Exxon grant earmarked the money as being for “environmental accountability.” And at one point, longtime Exxon employee C. Kenneth Roberts, who over 30 years rose up to the rank of vice president, sat on Landmark’s board. Billionaire Koch money is also linked to LLF. The Charles Koch Foundation has given money to LLF, according to Desmog.
Today, Landmark’s largest funder is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, whose foundation is named after the heiress to the Mellon family fortune, and who has been deceased for over 60 years. It has donated over $1 million since 2020, according to Philanthropy.org.
§ 2 · Record of fronting
For years while it’s received funding from oil and gas interests, Landmark Legal Foundation has sought to roll back greenhouse gas emissions, protect coal, and stop anyone seeking to hold fossil fuel companies liable for damages due to climate change.
In 2010, the group challenged the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, which became the scientific and legal foundation for federal climate regulation.
Landmark warned that regulating carbon pollution could have “perhaps crippling” economic consequences, and urged the courts to toss the finding. It lost, but that did not stop the group from coming back again and again as a legal battering ram against climate rules.
When the Obama administration rolled out the Clean Power Plan, which sought to cut carbon pollution from power plants and accelerate a shift away from coal, Landmark sided with the states and industry interests trying to kill it. Years later, when the issue was back at the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. EPA, LLF argued that federal regulators lacked the authority to push utilities away from high polluting power sources. This time, the challengers won, and Landmark celebrated the ruling.
Now Landmark is helping oil companies fight a different threat: climate lawsuits that could force them to pay for the damage their products helped cause. In 2026, Landmark joined a Supreme Court brief backing ExxonMobil and Suncor in their battle with Boulder, Colorado, where local governments are seeking compensation for climate-related damages. Landmark dismissed those suits as “regulation-by-litigation,” arguing that cities should not be allowed to use the courts to impose what it calls national energy policy.
§ 3 · The cover story, debunked
Global warming projections are a “low probability,” and the EPA’s concerns are based on a HYPERLINK "https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/Endangerment%20-%20Atlantic%20Legal%20Foundation%20Amicus%20in%20Support%20of%20Petitioners.pdf"“remote and unproven fear.”
Even at the time, that was an inaccurate description of the record. In 2012, the D.C. Circuit examined the Endangerment Finding and concluded that EPA had marshaled a “substantial” body of scientific evidence showing that greenhouse gases trap heat, human activity was increasing their atmospheric concentrations, and that anthropogenic greenhouse gases were very likely the principal cause of the observed warming.
In 2011, it said that the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions will have “sweeping” and “perhaps crippling economic effects.”
Automakers in subsequent years went on to outperform the standards for the first four years of the program, between 2012 and 2015. And manufacturers adopted fuel efficient technologies at unprecedented rates, all while vehicle sales increased for 7 consecutive years.