Ariel Nelson is a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), where she focuses on credit and background check reporting and issues at the intersection of criminal and consumer law. She is the author of NCLC’s report Broken Records Redux: How Errors by Criminal Background Check Companies Continue to Harm Consumers Seeking Jobs and Housing; a co-author of NCLC’s Commercialized (In)Justice Litigation Guide: Applying Consumer Laws to Commercial Bail, Prison Retail, and Private Debt Collection; and a contributing author of NCLC’s Fair Credit Reporting and Collection Actions treatises. Previously, Ariel litigated administrative and environmental law cases as a staff attorney/clinical teaching fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. She also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Judge David O. Carter of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and to the Honorable Judge Dorothy W. Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She earned her B.A. summa cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley, and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School.