Roger Severino oversees the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, focusing on religious liberty, marriage, and life issues.
Severino comes to Heritage from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, where he served as a trial attorney in the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section. At DOJ, he worked on dozens of district and appellate court matters involving matters such as the Fair Housing Act and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA).
Prior to DOJ, Severino was the Chief Operations Officer and Legal Counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he argued for the rights of religious believers and houses of worship to be free from discrimination and unjustified government burdens. While at Becket, he led an international coalition in blocking proposed anti-conversion laws in Sri Lanka, won asylum for a family facing a potential death sentence in Iran for converting to Christianity, and had an amicus brief he drafted cited by the Supreme Court dissent in Kelo v. New London.
Severino has contributed articles on church and state issues for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and The New Republic Online.
His publications include “Or for Poorer? How Same Sex Marriage Threatens Religious Liberty,” in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and “Improving Public Education Through Strengthened Local Control,” for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Severino earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was President of the Society for Law, Life, and Religion, a Master’s in Public Policy, with highest distinction, from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelor of Science in Business from the University of Southern California where he was a National Merit Scholar.