Legal Defense Fund’s Leah Aden ’02 Loved Low Steps and JJ’s Place

Leah C. Aden ’02 is senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; she joined LDF in 2012. She served as deputy director of litigation from 2018 to 2023, assisting in the planning, strategy and supervision of LDF’s voting rights work to address vote denial and vote dilution schemes. In her civil rights advocacy work, Aden uses litigation, policy and public education strategies to ensure that Black people have equal access to the political process, economic opportunity and environmental justice. In October 2023 Aden argued before the Supreme Court of the United States as lead counsel in South Carolina v. McMaster/Alexander v. SC NAACP, joining the small cohort of Black women advocates (including Constance Baker Motley LAW’46) who have appeared before the court.

Prior to joining LDF, Aden was a litigation associate in the New York City office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, having earned the prestigious Fried Frank/LDF Fellowship. She was also a fellow at the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she focused on public education issues, and served as a law clerk for the Hon. John T. Nixon of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. Aden earned her J.D. from the Howard University School of Law.

What were you like when you arrived at Columbia?

I was anxiously eager and hopeful about all of the experiences ahead of me; green to the ways of big(ger) city life; inspired by all of the talented people around me; and aware of the privilege of attending a world-class university that had been pushed over its long history to be more open and inclusive to Black women students like me.

What do you remember about your first-year living situation?

It was a period of great transition: having to share and seek out privacy in a single room with twin beds and one bathroom in a four-person unit on Carman 7; laughing at my roommate and I sometimes learning that we had inadvertently color-coordinated our outfits, even though we got dressed at different times, because of the symbiosis we had formed; indoctrinating my non-Black floormates to the ways that some Black women roller-set their hair and dry it under a soft-bonnet dryer; and moving like a wolf pack with floormates to and from the cafeteria.

What Core class or experience do you most remember, and why?

I struggled with the Core Curriculum as a CC student. Much activism over decades went into pushing the College to include non-western European people in the Core canon and progress certainly had been made by my time. However, more perspectives were needed and likely still are. So I used my time during my undergrad experience as a member of SPEAK (Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge) to contribute to ongoing efforts to challenge the exclusion of Black and other communities of color from what the College considered its canon. If the value of learning the Core included being able to contribute knowledgeably to discussions at dinner parties, as I had been told was a purpose, it remains the case that I am much more likely to invoke Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin and Nina Simone than The Iliad or The Odyssey (unless we’re talking about Romare Bearden) in those discussions.

Did you have a favorite spot on campus, and what did you like about it?

My favorite spot was either the Low Steps or what I recall was an eatery in the basement of John Jay. The Steps were where friends and I met on purpose, in passing, for the Outkast concert senior year, for people watching and much more. The eatery was where friends met — after leaving meet-up messages for each other on our pre-cellphone era dorm-room landlines — for late night chicken parmesan sandwiches and other snacks.

What, if anything, about your College experience would you do over?

The College has an abundance of resources, including its immense footprint in New York City and the world, and the talent it attracts. I would seek out more of the resources and opportunities that likely were available on- and off-campus, beyond the many opportunities that I did take advantage of: studying abroad in South Africa; tutoring elementary school students in Harlem; protesting invited speakers to campus whose work harmed communities I am a part of; attending lectures at the Law School and SIPA; and serving as a research assistant for a luminary of women’s and gender studies for my work-study job, a job which I needed because I benefited from a range of federal and private funding to make my education possible.