Hecht, Emily

Emily Hecht joined SLDN in 2006 and currently serves as a Staff Attorney.

Emily comes to SLDN from the American Bar Association where she spent two years as Assistant Director of the Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities. During her time with the ABA, Emily worked on a variety of civil rights, human rights and social justice issues, lobbying on the state and federal levels and coordinating educational programming and publications for both the legal community and the general public. In addition to her work on voting rights, Title IX, immigration reform, first amendment rights, and Native American issues, Emily spent a great deal of her time working on LGBT issues including marriage equality, adoption and foster care by LGBT parents, transgender employment discrimination, and LGBT asylum and immigration policies.

Emily earned her BA in history from the American University in 1996, and her J.D. from the Catholic University Columbus School of Law in 2004. While in law school, Emily clerked for a family law firm specializing in LGBT issues and a union-side labor and employment law firm. She served as a student-lawyer in the Families and the Law Clinic, where she focused on domestic violence and family law and developed and implemented community legal education programs for children and adults focusing on family law issues.

Prior to attending law school, Emily spent three years with CARE, cultivating major individual and corporate donors, members of Congress and the diplomatic community and working with them to educate the general public about CARE’s work abroad.