Vikram Swaruup

Vikram Swaruup joined Legal Aid DC as Executive Director in February of 2023. He previously worked as the Chief Deputy Attorney General for the District of Columbia.  

While at the Office of the Attorney General, he worked closely with Legal Aid DC on a range of issues, including tenant and consumer protection matters.  

Vikram helped to start the D.C. Attorney General Office’s Civil Rights Section. In that role, he was counsel on a successful 2020 lawsuit challenging the federal government’s efforts to kick hundreds of thousands of Americans off food stamps – a case he worked with Legal Aid DC, which represented individual District residents who would have been impacted. 

Before joining the Attorney General’s Office, Vikram was an appellate attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, where he defended the constitutionality of the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act. He clerked for Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Lucy H. Koh who at the time served on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (and now serves on the Ninth Circuit as well). He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California Berkeley School of Law.