Leslie Proll

Leslie M. Proll is the Director of the Washington, D.C. office of LDF. She has worked for LDF since 1998. Leslie oversees LDF’s policy and legislative work in our nation’s capital. She coordinates and implements strategy on federal civil rights legislation, including the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. She monitors executive branch and federal judicial nominations. She also supervises LDF’s responses to federal agency actions involving civil rights.

Prior to joining LDF, Leslie was a civil rights lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama for almost a decade. She has litigated dozens of federal civil rights cases, including class actions and jury trials, in the areas of housing discrimination, employment discrimination, voting rights and school desegregation. She was a member of the plaintiffs’ trial team in two of the three trials of Alabama’s higher education desegregation case, Knight v. State of Alabama.

Leslie founded the first fair housing organization in Alabama. She was the first female Chair of the Alabama State Bar Labor and Employment Section. She was Chair of the Minority Participation Committee of the Birmingham Bar Association. She has served as Co-Chair of the Fair Housing Task Force of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights since 2000. She also serves as Co-Chair of the Civil Rights Committee of the Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section of the American Bar Association. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. In 2003, she received the Congressional Black Caucus Chairs Award.

Leslie began her career as a law clerk to Chief Judge Sam Pointer, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Davis School of Law.