JAMES K. BREDAR

    Magistrate Judge James K. Bredar was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on February 6, 1957. Judge Bredar attended Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1975 until 1979, where he received his B.A. degree, cum laude. From 1979 until 1981, he attended the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., and from 1981 until 1982 he attended the Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. He received his J.D., cum laude, from Georgetown in 1982.

    Judge Bredar was raised in Colorado, and between 1976 and 1980 he worked during the summers as a ranger with the National Park Service in that state. From 1983 until 1984 he served as a judicial law clerk for the Honorable Richard P. Matsch, a U.S. District Judge in the District of Colorado. From 1984 until 1985, Judge Bredar worked as a Deputy District Attorney in Craig, Colorado. He went on to serve as an Assistant United States Attorney in Denver from 1985 until 1989. In 1989, Judge Bredar became an Assistant Federal Public Defender, again in Denver. He remained in this position until 1991 when he moved to London, England, to serve as a Project Director with the Vera Institute of Justice, a non-profit research organization based in New York. Judge Bredar later returned to the United States and was appointed the Federal Public Defender for the District of Maryland in November 1992. On January 26, 1998, Judge Bredar was appointed a United States Magistrate Judge in this District.

    Judge Bredar was admitted to the Colorado Bar in 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court Bar in 1994, and the Maryland Bar in 1995. He is also admitted to the Bar of the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fourth and Tenth Circuits and the U.S. District Courts for Maryland and Colorado. In 2007 Judge Bredar was appointed a member of the United States Judicial Conference Committee on Federal-State Jurisdiction. He is a Trustee of the Vera Institute of Justice and a Governor of the Maryland Chapter of the Federal Bar Association. He is a member of the Lawyers’ Round Table and Sergeant’s Inn law clubs in Baltimore.

    Judge Bredar is the author of Justice Informed: The Pre-Sentence Pilot Trials in the Crown Court, Her Majesty's Home Office, Great Britain, February 1992; and "Moving Up the Day of Reckoning: Strategies for Attacking the Cracked Trials Problem," The Criminal Law Review (British law journal), March 1992.