Maha Jweied
National Legal Aid & Defender Association Senior Fellow
Washington, DC
Maha Jweied is senior fellow with the National Legal Aid & Defender Association. Until January 2018, she served as the acting director of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Access to Justice, the primary office in the Executive Branch championing indigent defense and civil legal aid for low-income and vulnerable communities. In that role, she also served as the executive director of the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable and represented the U.S. Government as its indigent defense and legal aid expert in international settings. Before joining DOJ, she was a senior attorney-advisor at the US Commission on Civil Rights, a litigation associate at Arent Fox, and spent time at Mizan Law Group for Human Rights, a legal aid office in Jordan. She serves on the board of directors of the International Legal Foundation, the board of directors of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the advisory board of New Perimeter, a global pro bono program of DLA Piper. She is also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a fellow with NYU’s Center for International Cooperation.