St. Louis Speaker Series – Loretta Lynch

Loretta Lynch: Former U.S. Attorney General

Tuesday, September 20, 2022 8pm

One of the most highly accomplished public figures in America today, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch has been a leading progressive voice during her 30+ year highly distinguished career.

Lynch is the first female African American Attorney General of the United States. Nominated by President Obama in November 2014, she was sworn in as the 83rd Attorney General of the United States by then-Vice President Joe Biden in April 2015.

Described by President Barack Obama as “the only lawyer in America who battles mobsters, drug lords and terrorists, and still has the reputation for being a charming ‘people person,’” she has been instrumental in shaping the direction of the nation on several tough issues. She improved the relationship between local law enforcement and the communities they serve, and she has taken bold stances on criminal justice reform.

In 1990, after a period in private practice, Lynch joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York located in Brooklyn, the city she considers her adopted home. In 1999, President Bill Clinton appointed her to lead the office as United States Attorney, a post she held until 2001. Then again, in 2010, Lynch was appointed head U.S. Attorney by President Obama.

Lynch has spent years in the trenches rising through the ranks as a prosecutor, aggressively fighting terrorism, financial fraud and cybercrime — all while vigorously defending civil and human rights.

While leading the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, she became known for the high-profile civil rights conviction of two Brooklyn police officers who brutally assaulted Haitian immigrant Abner Louima.

While in private practice, Lynch served as a volunteer legal advisor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established to prosecute those responsible for human rights violations in the 1994 genocide in that nation.

Born in Greensboro, NC, the daughter of a school librarian and fourth generation Baptist minister, Lynch was also inspired by stories about her grandfather, a sharecropper in the 1930s, who helped members of his community who had no recourse under the Jim Crow system.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, from Harvard College in 1981, and received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984.