BLF Year Long Grant 2025-26

Columbia Law School

Public Justice, Students’ Civil Rights Project

Patricia Okonta is a Staff Attorney in Public Justice’s Students’ Civil Rights’ Project.
Prior to joining Public Justice, Patricia served as Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) where she worked on a variety of racial justice
matters across the country, including challenging the South Carolina Department of
Education’s attempts to censor curriculum and erode the quality of public education;
discriminatory dress and grooming codes in schools; and the constitutionality of
California’s capital punishment scheme. Previously, she served as a law clerk for Chief
Judge Margo K. Brodie of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York
and the Honorable Jane B. Stranch in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Patricia will be working on a variety of racial and gender justice cases to defend
students’ rights. This will include challenges to a state’s attempts to censor school
curricula, discriminatory school policies that target students with culturally-significant
hair styles, a private preschool’s racially discriminatory discipline and retaliation, and
state laws that threaten to withhold funding from schools that permit transgender
students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity. It will also include a
challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to gut the Department of Education’s
Office for Civil Rights (OCR) by imposing a massive reduction in force that cut half of
the OCR’s staff and closed over half of its regional offices.

Patricia received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, as a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar
and Cambell Award Recipient, and served as Executive Editor of the Columbia Human
Rights Law Review and former staffer of the Jailhouse Lawyers Manual. She received
her B.A., with distinction, from Yale University.

Patricia’s position is funded in collaboration between the Public Justice Foundation and the Berkeley Law Foundation.