Vanessa Ruiz (born March 22, 1950) is a senior associate judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Ruiz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and graduated from Wellesley College in 1972 with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, and in 1975 from Georgetown University Law Center with a Juris Doctor.

Early in her career, Ruiz was one of the first women to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court, successfully representing a fair housing organization and its testers in Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, 455 U.S. 363 (1982), a seminal case setting the new standard for organizational standing in federal court.

She is also a member of the American Law Institute and serves on the board of trustees for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

[7] She went on to marry David E. Birenbaum, a retired partner of Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson and former US Ambassador to the United Nations for Management and Reform.