Ariel Levinson-Waldman is the Founding President and Director-Counsel of Tzedek DC, a public interest center headquartered at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, with additional offices in Ward 8 in Southeast DC. Drawing inspiration from the Jewish teachings of “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,” or “Justice, justice you shall pursue,” Tzedek DC’s mission is to safeguard the legal rights and financial health of DC residents with low incomes dealing with the often devastating consequences of abusive debt collection practices and other consumer-related issues.

Under Ariel's leadership, since its launch in 2017, Tzedek DC has provided free and financial counseling legal help to over 4,000 DC households facing debt collection, consumer, or credit problems, distributed Know Your Rights materials to tens of thousands of DC residents and community college students, and championed reforms that led to 65,000 people whose drivers licenses had previously been suspended for unpaid traffic debts regaining the right to drive in the District of Columbia. A litigator by background, Ariel has handled oral arguments on behalf of clients before the local and federal trial and appellate courts in the District of Columbia and supervised amicus briefings in the U.S. Supreme Court and various courts of appeals.

In 2021, Tzedek DC received a national award from the Foundation for Improvement of Justice, which recognizes innovative programs that have made demonstrable improvements to local, state, and federal systems of justice, and that can serve as models. The organization has also been selected for major grant awards, including from the Ford Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, the DC Bar Foundation, and the Greater Washington Community Foundation Health Equity Fund.

Ariel’s professional recognition for his work at Tzedek DC has included being:

• Awarded the 2024 National Legal Aid Defenders Association (NLADA) Kutak-Rock Prize, given to two lawyers in the United States to recognize extraordinary contributions to advancing access to justice and racial equity in civil legal aid and public defense.

• Named a 2023 Rising Star by the National Consumer Law Center, one of three such awards given in the nation.

• Named by the Catalogue for Philanthropy as a 2021 Changemaker.

• Elected Co-chair of the DC Consortium of Legal Services (2021 and again in 2023). 

• Appointed by DC Court of Appeals Chief Judge Anna Blackburne-Rigsby to the DC Access to Justice Commission. 

• Elected Member of the American Law Institute, a national association of distinguished lawyers, judges, and academics that works to clarify and improve the law through the publication of Restatements of the Law and Model Codes.

• Appointed by the Chief Judge to serve from 2016-2024 on the DC Circuit's Judicial Conference Standing Committee on Pro Bono Legal Services.

• Named July 2020 Lawyer of the Month by the American Constitution Society.

His work has been published or featured in the Washington Post, CNN, Washington City Paper, DCLine, Washington Lawyer Magazine, Huffington Post, National Review, University of Chicago Law Review, the American Constitution Society, and Washington Jewish Week, on television by Fox5, ABC7, and WUSA9, and on radio by NPR, WAMU, and WPFW.

Over the course of his career prior to founding Tzedek DC, Ariel served in all three branches of the federal government and in the DC Government and also was in private practice.

From 2015-January 2017, he served in the Obama administration as the Department of Labor Advisor to the White House Interagency Legal Aid Roundtable, a coordinated effort to promote low-income Americans' access to civil legal aid as part of the federal government's anti-poverty efforts.

From 2011-2015, he served as the Senior Counsel to the DC Attorney General, where he played a Chief of Staff role and helped direct the District’s consumer protection enforcement and policy advocacy efforts. For that work, he received the 2014 Daniel Curtin Award, given annually to one public lawyer in the country under the age of forty for outstanding service to the public and the highest ethics and integrity in the practice of public law.

Earlier in his career, he served under Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the Office of General Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he received a 2011 bi-partisan Congressional Tribute for Distinguished Service based on his work representing the House Judiciary Committee.

Before his government lawyer service, Ariel practiced for five years in the Litigation Department of WilmerHale, where his work included representing the NAACP, and he was a Fellow at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Voting Rights Project. Ariel began his legal career by serving as a law clerk to Judge Robert H. Henry of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Ariel has taught as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and at the University of the District of Columbia David A Clarke School of Law. He is a graduate, with honors, of Northwestern University and of the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a student attorney in the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic Employment Discrimination Project and an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review.

Ariel’s commitment to access to justice in our society stems in part from his grandparents' experiences as Holocaust survivors and his father's experience as an immigrant to the United States. He lives in the District of Columbia’s Ward 4 with his wife Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a civil liberties lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, and their daughter and son.