Biography
43rd Legislative District
Jamie Pedersen grew up in Puyallup, graduated from Puyallup High School and worked at McDonald’s to help put himself through Yale, where he studied Russian and history, and graduated summa cum laude. After spending a year living in Russia and collecting oral histories of Soviet Afghan war veterans, Jamie attended Yale Law School. He clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then returned to Seattle – and Capitol Hill – in 1995. He practiced law at Preston Gates & Ellis (now K&L Gates) for 17 years. In May 2012, he went to work at McKinstry, a Seattle-based construction and engineering firm with substantial expertise in green building, where he is Executive Vice President and General Counsel.
Jamie was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006 and was appointed to the Senate in December 2013 and elected in 2014, 2018, and 2022. He served four years as chair of the Senate Law & Justice Committee. In November 2024, he was elected Senate Majority Leader after serving three years as Majority Floor Leader. He continues to serve on the Ways & Means Committee and the Rules Committee.
During his tenure in the House, he served for five years as chair of the House Judiciary Committee. He also served on the House Appropriations Committee, the Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government, the Higher Education Committee, the Health Care & Wellness Committee, the Business & Financial Services Committee, and the Capital Budget Committee. Jamie has also been a commissioner on the national Uniform Law Commission since 2010.
Jamie helped to organize and was a plaintiff in League of Education Voters v. State of Washington, the case that overturned several Tim Eyman initiatives that purported to require 2/3 majorities to pass tax increases in the legislature.
In 2012, Jamie led efforts to pass historic marriage equality legislation as prime sponsor of the House version of the bill. Voters approved the law that fall, making Washington the seventh state in the nation to allow same-sex couples to marry.
In 2018, Jamie sponsored and passed legislation to update the state’s Uniform Parentage Act to make it easier for LGBTQ+ families to have legal protections for children and to ensure all people in Washington state can legally compensate surrogates. He has led efforts to pass similar legislation across the country, enacting the Parentage Act in eleven states so far.
In 2019, Jamie passed legislation to make Washington the first state in the nation to allow composting as an environmentally-friendly alternative to burial or cremation of human remains. The law gave Washington residents more freedom to determine for themselves how they’d like to dispose of their bodies.
In 2021, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Jamie passed legislation to provide timely and effective enforcement of state standards for law enforcement officers, allowing the Criminal Justice Training Commission to discipline officers unfit to carry a badge and gun. Jamie’s legislation also set stricter background check standards for officers and established a public database of all decertification actions.
In 2023, he helped to end a decades-long legacy of injustice by passing legislation to abolish the death penalty in Washington law. Due to the racially biased application of the death penalty, it had been deemed unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court in 2018.
In 2025, he sponsored and passed a major expansion of services and funding for public school students with disabilities.
In 2026, he sponsored and passed the Millionaires Tax – the most substantial progressive tax reform in state history. The 9.9% tax on income above $1 million represents historic progress to reduce taxes for working families and make one of the most regressive tax codes in the nation more fair.
Jamie has helped lead efforts on several measures to reduce gun violence. Since 2018, the Legislature has prohibited the sale of assault weapons; required a 10-day waiting period and comprehensive safety training for purchases of all firearms; banned bump stocks; added domestic violence harassment to the list of conditions that prevent people from buying a firearm; adopted a first-in-the-nation measure to let people struggling with mental illness place themselves on a firearms do-not-purchase list; prohibited open carry of firearms at public demonstrations; banned large capacity magazines; restricted ghost guns; and restricted weapons at public meetings, gatherings, public libraries, zoos and aquariums, and transit stations; and required gun manufacturers and dealers to impose reasonable controls to prevent their products from getting into the hands of dangerous individuals.
Jamie is actively involved in many community and nonprofit organizations. He is the past President and current Treasurer and council member of Central Lutheran Church on Capitol Hill, where he helped establish a nonprofit to run a community lunch program that feeds hundreds of people each week.
Jamie chaired the board of the national civil rights organization Lambda Legal, continues to serve on its National Leadership Council, and was Lambda’s lead volunteer lawyer on the state’s marriage equality case. He also provides free legal services to a variety of nonprofits, such as Social Venture Partners, Seattle Girls’ Choir, and Flying House Productions. He has sung in the Seattle Men’s Chorus since 1996. An Eagle Scout, Jamie is also an adult leader in Scout Troop 15, which meets at Epiphany School in Madrona.
Jamie lives on Capitol Hill with his husband, Eric Pedersen, and their sons Trygve, Leif, Erik and Anders, all of whom attend Seattle Public Schools.