Honorable Michael A. Hammer, U.S.M.J.
Michael A. Hammer was sworn in as a United States Magistrate Judge for the District of New Jersey on August 12, 2011. In that capacity, Judge Hammer has conducted hundreds of settlement conferences in many areas of complex commercial and civil litigation, including intellectual property, antitrust, theft and misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of contract, products liability and mass tort litigation, civil rights, and employment discrimination.
Before becoming a Magistrate Judge, Judge Hammer was an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey for thirteen years. From May 2006 to August 2011, Judge Hammer served as Chief of the National Security Unit. In that position, Judge Hammer supervised and prosecuted a variety of counter-terrorism and counter-espionage investigations, including serving as co-trial counsel in a three-month trial against five men who were convicted of conspiracy to murder government personnel. Judge Hammer also served as a Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division, supervising a wide variety of white-collar and other criminal prosecutions. From 2002 until 2006, Judge Hammer served in the Special Prosecutions Division, handling public corruption investigations and trials. From 1996 to 1998, Judge Hammer was an associate at McElroy, Deutsch & Mulvaney (now McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter) in Morristown, New Jersey, and worked on a variety of commercial litigation matters. Judge Hammer also clerked for former District Judge Garrett E. Brown and then-Magistrate Judge Stanley R. Chesler. Judge Hammer graduated from Seton Hall University School of Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Seton Hall Law Review, and the University of Michigan.