Leah C. Aden currently serves as Senior Counsel at LDF. Leah previously served as a Deputy Director of Litigation at LDF from October 2018 to May 2023, assisting in the planning, strategy, and supervision of LDF’s voting rights work addressing vote denial and vote dilution schemes. During the post-2020 Census redistricting cycle — the first in decades with severely weakened legal protections—Leah led the planning, strategy, and supervision of challenges to state and local bodies, including in Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Illinois and Mississippi, to prevent racial discrimination in line-drawing that harms Black voters.

Since joining LDF in February 2012 and into the present, Leah also has had an active civil rights advocacy docket. She uses litigation, policy, and public education strategies to ensure that Black people have equal access to the political process, economic opportunity, and environmental justice.

Leah is LDF’s lead counsel in South Carolina v. McMaster/Alexander v. SC NAACP, a challenge involving the harms of the racially discriminatory federal congressional and state House maps. In 2022, the parties settled the challenge to the House map, resulting in fairer electoral opportunities for Black voters. And in January 2023, a unanimous panel found after trial that one of three congressional districts Plaintiffs challenged under the U.S. Constitution was racially gerrymandered and intentionally discriminatory; that decision is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court where Leah presented oral argument in October 2023.

Leah also currently is LDF’s lead counsel in a challenge to Arkansas’s 2022-enacted congressional map for racial discrimination (i.e., racial gerrymandering and intentional vote dilution) in violation of the Constitution.

And Leah is LDF’s lead counsel in an action to preserve the consent decree in the landmark Chisom case, which established the first and only district anchored in New Orleans Parish under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which provides Black voters with the opportunity to elect their preferred candidate to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Leah was a member of LDF’s litigation team in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, a major case in which the Supreme Court of the United States immobilized Section 5, the heart of the VRA. Over more than four decades, Section 5 deterred, scrutinized, ameliorated, and blocked racially discriminatory voting changes that certain jurisdictions attempted to implement. Without Section 5’s protections in place following Shelby County, Leah has successfully led LDF’s efforts to block a panoply of discriminatory voting changes impacting every phase of voting.

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