Jim Bendat, JD

Inaugural historian and Author

**Jim Bendat** is a lawyer, author and inaugural historian. Bendat graduated from Northwestern University and Loyola Law School, and he worked as a lawyer with the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s office from 1978 to 2013. His works have appeared in the New Republic, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, and CNN.com, and he covered the 1990 NCAA Final Four and three NBA Finals for Reuters. Since his first publication on presidential inauguration history in 2000, he has been featured as an inaugural historian by all of the major networks in the United States, as well as in Canada and the United Kingdom. He has worked as a correspondent at the past five inaugurations, for CNN, ABC, MSNBC, and British networks ITV and Sky News. Additionally, Democracy's Big Day was featured in a front-page New York Times story on January 28, 2009.