Victor Leung is chief legal and advocacy officer at the ACLU of Southern California. In this role, Victor leads the affiliate’s Advocacy/Legal Department, which comprises more than 60 attorneys, policy advocates, organizers, and support staff across offices in Los Angeles, Orange County, the Inland Empire, and Kern County.
Victor first joined the organization as a fellow and later returned as a staff attorney, focusing primarily on education, juvenile justice, and student rights issues. Most recently, he served as the affiliate’s deputy litigation director and directed its education equity project.
Victor’s cases include Mark S. v. California, which challenges Pittsburg Unified School District’s mistreatment of disabled students, English learners and Black students, including placing them in substandard learning environments and imposing disproportionate discipline against them; Sigma Beta Xi v. Riverside, which challenged a program that criminalized youth by placing children who have not committed crimes on probation; Community Coalition v. Los Angeles Unified School District, which ensured that LAUSD provides the proper amount of funding and services to high-need students under California’s Local Control Funding Formula; and Cruz v. California, which challenged policies that deprived students attending under-resourced schools of learning time.
Victor has also led campaigns, authored policy reports, and worked on legislation to increase resources for high-need students, ensure charter school accountability, and eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline, among other subjects. For example, he helped develop the Students Not Suspects campaign, which ended random metal detector searches in LAUSD; supports Gente Organizada on a campaign to end institutional violence in Pomona; and co-sponsored AB 1360, a bill prohibiting charter schools from enacting exclusionary admissions policies and disciplining students without due process. Victor and his work have been featured in local and national publications, including KPCC, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post.
Prior to re-joining the ACLU, Victor worked in private practice as a litigation associate at Latham & Watkins LLP. He graduated from Pomona College with a B.A. in media studies and from New York University School of Law. Victor was named one of California Lawyer Magazine’s Attorneys of the Year in 2018 and one of Daily Journal’s Top 40 Attorneys Under 40 in 2022. Victor formerly served on the board of directors of the ACLU of Southern California and currently serves on the board of the Social Justice Learning Institute. He was a OneJustice Executive Fellow and is a lecturer in law at UCLA School of Law. He is also a licensed foster parent.
