Hiram E. Puig-Lugo is Immediate Past President of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ). With NCJFCJ encouragement and support, he convened and chaired the DEI Collaborative, a conversation between 14 national legal organizations to promote fairness in the courts, since 2019.
He joined the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 1999. He has handled criminal felony, juvenile delinquency, criminal misdemeanor, child abuse and neglect, domestic relations, status offender, and domestic violence calendars. He is currently assigned to the Civil Division.
Judge Puig-Lugo is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he was the first Latino member of the Wisconsin Law Review. After graduation, he served as staff attorney with the Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia for eight years, and as trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Criminal Section, for three years.
Judge Puig-Lugo was Presiding Judge of the Family Court from 2014 to 2016. There, he started a Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) Working Group to coordinate interagency support for court-involved victims of commercial sexual exploitation. Previously, he chaired the Court’s Neglect Subcommittee and convened a stakeholder working group to address services for LGBTQ youth in the neglect and juvenile delinquency systems.
He chairs the Superior Court Judicial Education Committee and sits on the D.C. Courts Standing Committee on Fairness and Access to the Courts. He has served on the D.C. Access to Justice Commission and the D.C. Courts Strategic Planning Leadership Council.