Judge Todd E. Edelman was appointed to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 2010 by President Barack Obama. Since his appointment, he has presided over civil, criminal, and domestic violence cases, including over 150 jury trials. Judge Edelman served as Deputy Presiding Judge of the Superior Court’s Civil Division in 2021 – 2022 and as Presiding Judge of the Civil Division in 2023 – 2024. He also serves on the faculty of the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Clinic and as a member of the District of Columbia Sentencing Commission, and frequently volunteers his time as a guest lecturer and trainer on trial practice issues.

Judge Edelman is an honors graduate of both Yale University and the New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden Scholar. After his graduation from law school, Judge Edelman moved to Washington to serve as a law clerk for the Honorable William B. Bryant on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Following his clerkship, Judge Edelman was awarded an E. Barrett Fellowship at the Georgetown University Law Center. As a Prettyman Fellow, he spent two years supervising law students Georgetown Law’s Criminal Justice Clinic. From 1997 to 2005, he was a trial attorney at the Public Defender Service (PDS) for the District of Columbia, trying dozens of criminal cases before judges and juries in D.C. Superior Court. Judge Edelman served as Chief of the PDS Serious Felony Section from 2002 to 2004 and as its Training Director from 2004 to 2005. Judge Edelman subsequently spent several years in private practice at the Washington, D.C. firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser PPLC, where he focused his work on representing labor unions, pension funds, and individual employees in complex civil litigation in state and federal courts nationwide. Immediately prior to his appointment to the bench, Judge Edelman was a clinical professor at Georgetown Law, where he taught as a Visiting Associate Professor of Law in the Criminal Justice Clinic.

Judge Edelman has been an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown Law since 2014. In 2022, Georgetown awarded him the Charles Fahy Distinguished Adjunct Professor Award.