Leslie Landis (1954 - )

Leslie Landis has spent more than four decades building Chicago's institutional response to domestic violence — often as the first person to hold the job. Born in 1954 on an Army base in Fort Knox, Kentucky, and raised in Beaver, Pennsylvania, she studied sociology and social work at Edinboro University before a paralegal job representing mothers caught in the child welfare system — many of them domestic violence victims blamed for their own abuse — sent her to Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C.

After law school, she worked on the federal government's earliest domestic violence policy efforts before moving to Chicago in 1982, where she became founding Executive Director of Lifespan, building a combined counseling-and-legal-services model for survivors. She helped found the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women's Network, co-authored major revisions to the Illinois Domestic Violence Act, and helped establish the state's first specialized domestic violence court.

In 1997, Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed her founding director of the city's Office on Domestic Violence, where she built the citywide DV Help Line and a major community-mobilization initiative. She later became the first Court Administrator of Cook County's Domestic Violence Division (2010–2019), taught at DePaul University College of Law, and most recently helped launch a supervised visitation center at Loyola University. She continues to consult nationally on court-based reforms.