Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham Jr. (February 25, 1928 – December 14, 1998) was an American civil rights advocate, historian, presidential adviser, and federal court judge. From 1990 to 1991, he served as chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Originally nominated to the bench by President Kennedy in 1963, Higginbotham was the seventh African-American Article III judge appointed in the United States, and the first African-American United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He was elevated to the Third Circuit in 1977, serving as a federal judge for nearly 30 years in all. In 1995, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Higginbotham used the name "Leon" informally.

Higginbotham was born on February 25, 1928, in Ewing Township, a suburb of Trenton, New Jersey. His mother, Emma Lee Higginbotham, was a maid, and his father, Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham Sr., was a factory worker. Higginbotham was raised in a largely African-American neighborhood, and attended a segregated grammar school.

Higginbotham attended Lincoln School, a segregated high school in Trenton. Before Higginbotham attended, no black student had been put on the academic track (which was a significant step towards attending college), because Latin, a requirement for the program, was not taught at the black elementary schools. Higginbotham's mother convinced the principal at the junior high school to enroll him in a second-year Latin course, even though he had never studied first year Latin. To ensure that he was able to pass the required classes, the junior high Latin teacher offered to tutor him at her home during the summer. Higginbotham's family was of modest economic means, so he worked while attending school, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, and working as a bus boy at the Stacy Trent hotel. While in high school, Higginbotham manipulated his birth certificate in order to get working papers at 15, a year before the law allowed, so that he could work in a pottery factory shoveling clay.

At 16 Higginbotham enrolled in Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana. He chose Purdue because it admitted black students; was cheaper, at that time, than Rutgers University; and offered tuition discounts for good academic performance. Higginbotham was also interested in Purdue because he wanted to be an engineer, and Purdue was known as an engineering school.

Higginbotham entered Purdue as a freshman in 1944. At the time, the student body was composed of approximately 6,000 white students, and 12 black students. Although eligible for admission, black students were not permitted to live in the dormitories. Higginbotham and the other 11 black students were placed in a building called International House, which was the only building in which blacks could live in West Lafayette. The students slept in the attic, which was unheated. Higginbotham sought a meeting with the University President, Edward C. Elliott, to ask permission for the students to sleep in a section of one of the heated dormitories. Elliott's response was purportedly "[t]he law doesn't require us to put you in those dormitories. The law doesn't even require us to let you in. You take it or leave it." Higginbotham would later identify this encounter, and an incident where he was traveling with the Purdue debate team but unable to stay in a hotel with the rest of the members, as the events that caused him to pursue a career in the law, saying:

And then, even though I had been doing very well there, I decided that engineering would not make any difference in America. The most which a black person could do as an engineer is to make a better gadget, but a gadget which would not significantly do anything with the oppression. So I guess on that trip back to the segregated house, International House, I decided that I wanted to go into law and to challenge the system.

Higginbotham transferred to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1945. On the day that Higginbotham entered Antioch, one other black student was also admitted, Coretta Scott, who would later become Coretta Scott King after marrying Martin Luther King Jr. At Antioch, Higginbotham served as the head of the college chapter of the NAACP. While in college, Higginbotham successfully convinced the Governor of Ohio to support legislation to lower the voting age to 18. Higginbotham earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949.

In the fall of 1949 Higginbotham entered Yale Law School. As he had in grade school, he worked, this time as a butcher, to help support himself while at Yale. He was a member of the moot court team and the Barrister's Union (a mock trial organization). Higginbotham advanced to the finals of the first year moot court competition. The moot court panel before which he argued included Associate Justice Tom C. Clark (of the Supreme Court of the United States) and renowned appellate advocate John W. Davis. (A few years later, Davis would argue against Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the State of Kansas in Brown v. Board of Education.) In 1951, Higginbotham competed on a moot court team with Richard N. Gardner, who would later serve as United States Ambassador to Spain and the United States Ambassador to Italy. Higginbotham's Yale team competed against a team from Temple University Law School, which included another African American law student from the Philadelphia area, Clifford Scott Green, who would later become Higginbotham's colleague (first as a law partner and then as a fellow Judge on the Eastern District of Pennsylvania bench).