The Hon. Laurel Beeler is a magistrate judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. She was appointed to the bench in 2010, filling the seat vacated by the Hon. Wayne Brazil (Ret.).
Beeler earned an A.B. in philosophy and economics from Bowdoin College. She then completed a J.D. from the University of Washington School of Law.
She began her legal career as a staff attorney in the Office of Staff Attorneys for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1989. She served in that capacity for one year before being promoted to Civil Appeals Division Chief.
Then, in 1992, Beeler served as a judicial law clerk for the Hon. Cecil F. Poole of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. After her clerkship concluded in 1994, she joined the Office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, where she worked as an assistant United States attorney for the next fourteen years. During her tenure there, she was assigned to securities, white-collar, money-laundering, organized-crime, and narcotics cases. She also held such leadership positions as Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division, Major Crimes Supervisor, Health-Care Fraud Coordinator, and Professional Responsibility Officer.
Beeler has served as president of the Federal Bar Association and co-chair of the Lawyer Representatives to the Ninth Circuit. She has been a member of the Ninth Circuit Magistrate Judge Executive Board, the Ninth Circuit Criminal Case Committee, and the Ninth Circuit Jury Trial Improvement Committee, the Northern District Criminal Practice Committee. She has also been a national judicial liaison to the United States Department/Office of Defender Services Joint Electronic Technology Working Group.
She is a recipient of the Public Service Award from the Northern District Judicial Conference (2006), the Barristers Choice Award from the Bar Association of San Francisco (2015), and the Magistrate Judge of the Year Award from the San Francisco Trial Lawyers Association (2018).
While not presiding over cases, Beeler has taught Civil Trial Practice at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law as well as Criminal Procedure at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She has also led rule-of-law projects in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Jordan, Ukraine, Turkey, and Thailand.