Professor Edelman had a distinguished career in all three branches of government before joining the Law Center in 1982. He served as a law clerk for Judge Henry Friendly of the Second Circuit and Justice Arthur Goldberg of the U.S. Supreme Court. He was special assistant to Attorney General John Douglas at the Department of Justice and legislative assistant to Senator Robert Kennedy. In addition, he served as Vice President of the University of Massachusetts, director of the New York State Division for Youth, and was a partner with the D.C. firm of Foley & Lardner. He was the J. Skelly Wright Memorial Fellow at the Yale Law School during the spring of 1991. Professor Edelman has also been highly involved as a leader in community and national organizations; he has been Chairman of the Board of the Center for Community Change and co-chair of Americans for Peace Now, and was a board member of Common Cause and of the University of the District of Columbia. He is currently Board President of the New Israel Fund and also serves on the boards of the Public Welfare Foundation, the National Center for Youth Law, the Juvenile Law Center, and the Center for Law and Social Policy, among others. He teaches Constitutional Law, Social Welfare Law, and Public Interest Lawyering at the Law Center. He served as Director of the Federal Legislation Clinic in the spring of 2000, and in the spring of 2001, and founded a new District of Columbia Division of that clinic in the fall of 2001, to work on local issues affecting low-income people. From 1993 until spring 1997, he was on leave from the Law Center, serving first as Counselor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and then as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the same Department.