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James B. Rutledge, III
Profile
Committee Name: Friends of Jim Rutledge
Address: 210 N Hickory Ave
Bel Air, MD 21014-
Phone: (410) 404-5833
Email: jim@jimrutledge.me
James B. Rutledge III: A Harford Lawyer Asking Maryland to Put the Law First
James B. Rutledge III is the Republican nominee for Attorney General of Maryland. He faces Democratic incumbent Anthony G. Brown on November 3. He won the Republican primary unopposed on June 23 with 161,800 votes. Harford readers should know the office, because it is the one that decides whether the state’s top lawyer works for Maryland families or for the next national press conference.
Rutledge is a Harford son. He grew up on a county farm and worked beside his father, Dr. James B. Rutledge Jr., a Jarrettsville veterinarian who treated livestock and family pets and later served on the State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners. The lesson was not complicated: show up, do the work, keep your word. He graduated from North Harford High School in 1979. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin from the University of Georgia in 1983, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and captained the lacrosse team. He earned his J.D. with honors from the University of Maryland School of Law in 1986 — Order of the Coif, co-chair of the Moot Court Board, Myerowitz Best Legal Brief Award, Special Master for the Baltimore City Orphans’ Court. He is licensed in Maryland and Georgia.
For forty years he has practiced law as an officer of the court. Early years were spent in the trenches: civil and criminal litigation in state and federal courts — contracts, estates, fraud, commercial disputes, civil rights and constitutional work. Later years settled into the work that actually holds families and farms together: wills, trusts, probate, real estate, agricultural preservation, business counsel. His firm, Jim Rutledge Esq LLC, sits on North Hickory Avenue in Bel Air. The clients have been farmers, small businesses, school boards, health-care professionals, bankers, and ordinary property owners — not a party apparatus.
He has already served here. Governor Larry Hogan appointed him to the Judicial Nominating Commission for Harford County’s District and Circuit Courts. Voters elected him to the Bel Air Board of Town Commissioners in 2023. On that board he worked on short-term rental rules, a historic-preservation tax credit, school overcrowding protections, and ARPA funds to upgrade the town sewer system that drains toward the Bay. Fellow commissioners thanked him when he resigned in October 2025 to run statewide. Mayor Paula Etting called his legal judgment a lasting benefit to the town. He is a widower and the father of two adult children; one serves in the military.
Why vote for him is the same reason Harford has always preferred a neighbor who has already done the work. The Attorney General is a constitutional officer. The Maryland Constitution requires ten years as a Maryland lawyer and ten years of residency. Rutledge exceeds both. He says the current office has failed to make fighting crime a priority and has spent too much of the people’s money suing the federal government while Marylanders live with gangs, fentanyl, identity theft, and scams aimed at seniors. His first-100-days case is specific: pursue gang prosecutions with resolve, protect neighbors from cyber predators, support local prosecutors and police, and stop treating the office as a national partisan platform.
The Maryland State Fraternal Order of Police has endorsed him. That endorsement is not a slogan. It is the judgment of the people who work the streets that the next Attorney General should be a lawyer who has spent decades in courtrooms instead of press rooms. Rutledge talks about ending the revolving door of repeat offenders, cracking down on online predators who use social media against children, and defending conservation and agricultural preservation easements so Maryland can still grow food for Marylanders. He says he wants partisan politics out of the Attorney General’s Office. After forty years as an officer of the court, that is not a new conversion. It is the job description he has already lived.
Harford does not get a separate Attorney General. The person elected on November 3 will advise the state, defend the statutes, and decide which cases deserve the full weight of Maryland’s lawyers. Jim Rutledge is asking for that vote as a North Harford graduate who still practices on Hickory Avenue, who already sat on Bel Air’s board, and who treats the rule of law as a duty rather than a brand.
That is why he is on this ballot. That is why he is worth the line.
Anthony G. Brown
Additional Information
Committee Name: Friends of Anthony Brown
Address: 12138 Central Avenue #671
Bowie, MD 20721-
Phone: (410) 671-5307
Email: info@anthonybrown.com
Website: www.anthonybrown.com
Anthony G. Brown: Maryland’s Most Political Attorney General
The Attorney General of Maryland is supposed to be the state’s lawyer. The office defends the Constitution of Maryland, enforces consumer and Medicaid fraud statutes, and tells the General Assembly when a bill will not survive a courtroom. It is not supposed to be a national resistance shop, an equity office, or a campaign annex that sues Washington on a schedule.
Anthony Gregory Brown is asking Maryland for a second term in that chair. He is the Democratic incumbent. He faces Republican James B. Rutledge III on November 3. Brown ran unopposed in the June primary and took 568,685 Democratic votes. Rutledge, a former Bel Air town commissioner, ran unopposed on the Republican line. Brown did not complete The Baltimore Sun’s pre-primary questionnaire. That is not a small omission from a man who wants four more years as the state’s top lawyer.
Do not vote for him.
Who he is
Brown was born in Huntington, New York, on November 21, 1961. He took a government degree from Harvard College and a law degree from Harvard Law School. He clerked at the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, practiced at WilmerHale, and later did land-use work at Gibbs and Haller. He is a retired Army Reserve colonel. He flew as an aviator, served as a Judge Advocate, deployed to Iraq in 2004–2005 with the 353rd Civil Affairs Command, and came home with a Bronze Star. That service is real. It is also the biography he reaches for when the rest of the record gets uncomfortable.
Prince George’s County sent him to the House of Delegates in 1998. He rose to vice chair of Judiciary and Majority Whip. In 2006 Martin O’Malley put him on the ticket. Brown served two terms as lieutenant governor, from January 17, 2007, to January 21, 2015. He chaired the health-reform work. He advocated repeal of the death penalty, cannabis decriminalization, expanded expungement, and the post-Sandy Hook gun package. That is an O’Malley résumé. It is not an independent lawyer’s résumé.
Then came the health exchange. Brown was the administration’s point man for Maryland’s insurance marketplace. The site crashed on launch. The first build had to be scrapped. Hundreds of millions of dollars and a year of headlines later, Larry Hogan’s campaign called him “the most incompetent man in Maryland.” In November 2014 Hogan beat him by five points in a state Democrats usually own. Brown had outspent Hogan and still lost Baltimore County and the argument about competence. He spent 2017 through 2023 in the U.S. House from the 4th District, then used that perch to run for attorney general.
In 2022 he beat former First Lady Katie Curran O’Malley in the Democratic primary and Republican Michael Peroutka in the general, 1,287,418 to 691,910 — 64.95 percent to 34.90 percent. Harford did not give him that landslide. In this county Peroutka took 58,519 votes to Brown’s 43,532. Maryland swore him in on January 3, 2023, as the first Black attorney general in state history. Firsts are not a substitute for a nonpartisan law office.
Time magazine reported in May 2022 that Brown used funds from his congressional campaign account to bankroll the attorney general bid, which Maryland election law does not treat as a casual bookkeeping choice. He won anyway. The pattern did not end there.
What he did with the office
He built the office he wanted, not the office Maryland needed.
He stood up an Office of Equity, Policy, and Engagement. He created a Civil Rights Division. He inherited the Independent Investigations Division for police-involved deaths and treated it as a signature. He inherited the Archdiocese of Baltimore abuse report and released it. Those files were already in motion. What he added was a political architecture.
The Federal Accountability Unit is the tell. It did not exist during the Biden years because Brown did not need it. In 2023 and 2024 he filed zero adversarial actions against the Biden administration. After January 20, 2025, the unit became the point of the spear. By early 2026 his office had led or joined more than 50 lawsuits in the unit’s first year, plus dozens of amicus briefs and coalition letters. Maryland Matters called the Trump-era docket “voluminous” — more actions in months than Brian Frosh piled up in four years of the first Trump term. Critics put the running total past 100 legal actions and at least 60 formal lawsuits: tariffs, ICE facilities in Baltimore and Hagerstown, mail-in voting rules, SNAP, student loans, gender-policy fights, environmental permits. Brown told reporters the planning started before inauguration, using Heritage documents as a map of what to sue.
Harford’s own Del. Lauren Arikan called it “some of the greatest theatre that I’ve experienced in politics” and “the most politically motivated attorney general Maryland has ever seen.” House Minority Leader Jason Buckel asked how the state could fund a litigation shop while cutting developmental-disability and health programs. That is the right question. Maryland is running structural deficits, energy costs, and a housing fight. The attorney general’s answer has been another press conference about Washington.
He also skipped the part of the job that is not a podium. Republican nominee James Rutledge’s first line in The Sun questionnaire was that the current attorney general “has failed to make fighting crime a priority.” Brown’s public calendar does not refute that. The office can announce a Medicaid contractor suit or a landlord judgment. It cannot pretend that 100 federal lawsuits are the same work as making Maryland streets and dockets less dangerous.
Ethics questions followed him into the job and stayed there. In January 2025 the American Accountability Foundation asked the State Board of Elections, the State Ethics Commission, and the IRS to look at whether an Office of the Attorney General employee solicited Attorney General Alliance partner lists — law firms and companies — so Brown could invite them to a January 6, 2025, campaign fundraiser with tickets from $500 to $2,500. The event died in the snow. The texts did not. Friends of Anthony Brown reported a $46.50 in-kind from the Alliance. As of February 2026, Maryland Bay News noted the public still had no findings, no charges, no dismissal, and no explanation. That is a year of silence from the man who posts “no one is above the law.”
In July 2026 The Center Square reported that Brown’s office agreed to pay $570 an hour to Ballard Spahr, a firm that had donated to his campaign, with rates set to rise on renewal. Four other firms that received or were offered outside-counsel work — among them Cohen Milstein, Whiteford Taylor & Preston, Venable, and Saul Ewing — and their PACs had given a combined $30,250 to Friends of Anthony Brown. Donor counsel is not automatically a crime. It is exactly the appearance an attorney general is supposed to avoid.
Why Harford should vote no
Harford already told him no once. In 2022 this county preferred the Republican for attorney general. Nothing in the last four years is an argument to reverse that.
Brown is not a neutral lawyer who happened to be a Democrat. He is an O’Malley lieutenant who botched the health exchange, lost the governorship to a Republican in a blue state, sat in Congress, and then turned the Attorney General’s Office into a Federal Accountability Unit that sues only one party in Washington. He built equity offices. He ducked The Sun’s questionnaire. He left an ethics complaint sitting. He pays campaign-donor firms by the hour with public money.
James B. Rutledge III is the name on the other line: Phoenix, Maryland; University of Maryland Law, Order of the Coif; Bel Air town commissioner from 2023 to 2025. He says he will take partisan politics out of the office and put crime back in it. That is a lower bar than Brown has spent three years clearing. It is also the job description.
Maryland does not need another colonel at a microphone. Maryland needs a lawyer who will tell Annapolis the truth and stop billing the counties for a national lawsuit tour.
Do not give him the second term.
Vote no on Anthony G. Brown for Attorney General of Maryland on November 3.
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