Peter Edelman is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and poverty law and is faculty director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality. On the faculty since 1982, he has also served in all three branches of government. During President Clinton’s first term he was Counselor to Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala and then Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.
In academia, Edelman has been Associate Dean of Georgetown’s Law Center, Director of the New York State Division for Youth, and Vice President of the University of Massachusetts. He was a Legislative Assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and was Issues Director for Senator Edward Kennedy’s Presidential campaign in 1980. Earlier, he was a Law Clerk to Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg and before that to Judge Henry J. Friendly on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He also worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as Special Assistant to Assistant Attorney General John Douglas.
Edelman’s most recent book, So Rich So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America, was published by The New Press in May 2012. He previously wrote Searching for America’s Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope, which was published by Houghton-Mifflin in January 2001. He also co-authored Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men, which was published by the Urban Institute in 2006, and is the author of many articles on poverty, constitutional law, and issues about children and youth. His article in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,” received the Harry Chapin Media Award.
Edelman is currently chair of the District of Columbia Access to Justice Commission and the National Center for Youth Law, and formerly board chair of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy and the Public Welfare Foundation, board president emeritus of the New Israel Fund, and a board member of the Center for Law and Social Policy, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and a half dozen other nonprofit organizations.
He has been a United States-Japan Leadership Program Fellow, was the J. Skelly Wright Memorial Fellow at Yale Law School, and has received numerous honors and awards for his work. He grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota.