Janet Napolitano

About Janet Napolitano

Janet Napolitano (b. November 29, 1957) is the current governor of the U.S. state of Arizona, and a member of the Democratic Party, originally elected in 2002 and re-elected in 2006. She is Arizona's third female governor, and the first woman to win re-election. In November 2005, Time magazine named her one of the five best governors in the U.S. She served as the Chair of the National Governors Association in 2006-2007. In February 2006, Napolitano was named by The White House Project as one of "8 in '08", a group of eight female politicians who could possibly run and/or be elected president in 2008. Her placement on this list has also generated whispers of placement on the Democratic ticket for vice president.

Napolitano was born in New York City to Jane Marie Winer and Leonard Michael Napolitano, who was the Dean of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. She has two siblings, older brother, Leonard Michael Jr. and Nancy Angela Haunstein. She has partial Italian heritage on her father's side and was raised a Methodist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she graduated from Sandia High School in Albuquerque in 1975 and was voted Most Likely to Succeed. She graduated from Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, where she won a Truman Scholarship, and then from the University of Virginia School of Law (Juris Doctor). Napolitano is a member of the Democratic Party. Her early professional career was as an attorney at Phoenix law firm Lewis and Roca and as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona.

In 1991, while a partner with the private Phoenix law firm Lewis and Roca LLP, Napolitano served as attorney for Anita Hill. Anita Hill testified in the U.S. Senate that then U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had addressed her inappropriately ten years earlier when she was his subordinate at the federal EEOC.