Mr. James served as senior counsel to several national and international labor unions. He was the General Counsel to the Allied Pilots Association, the collective bargaining agent for the pilots at American Airlines, for twenty-five years. He has also represented thousands of individual workers in the private and public sectors in collective actions under the FLSA.
Edgar James specializes in labor, employment and non-profit organization law before state and federal courts as well as administrative agencies. For many years, Mr. James was a Senior Editor of the ABA’s treatise on the Railway Labor Act and frequent contributor to the ALI-ABA seminars on Airline and Railroad Labor Law. In the 1980’s, Mr. James was active in the efforts to oppose Frank Lorenzo in the airline industry and in the litigation surrounding the mineworker union’s fight to preserve retiree health care at the Pittston Company. In addition to his labor practice, Mr. James advises a number of marketing, polling and public relations firms on matters involving campaign finance, intellectual property and other issues related to their work.
Mr. James graduated with a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1979. While at Harvard, Mr. James conducted several seminars at the John F. Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, was an articles editor for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and authored a law review article on union democracy and the LMRDA. Prior to law school, Mr. James ran the insurgent campaign against W. A. “Tony” Boyle in the mineworkers election following the murder of Joseph A. Yablonski, his wife and daughter and later served as a senior staff member and organizer with the union. (Cillian Murphy is making a movie about the Yablonsky murders based on the book Blood Runs Coal, and Crooked Media is producing an 8-part podcast about the successful multi-year campaign to oust Tony Boyle from the mine workers.) Mr. James received his undergraduate degree from Portland State University in 1969 and attended Columbia University as a doctoral candidate in history.
Mr. James serves on the boards of a number of non-profit organizations. He is a member of the courts of the District of Columbia and the State of Maryland and is admitted to practice before most federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court. He is a member of the District of Columbia bar, the Maryland State Bar Association, the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee, the Federal Bar and American Bar Associations. Mr. James was elected a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2025. He has been awarded an AV Preeminent rating by Martindale Hubbell, the highest rating achievable by attorneys, was named the 2023 Lawyer of the Year for Labor Law - Union in Washington, D.C. in Best Lawyers in America, was voted a District of Columbia Super Lawyer and Lawdragon identified him as one of the 500 leading plaintiff employment and civil rights lawyers in the United States from 2021 – 2024.
