Janet Reno, the strong-minded Florida prosecutor who was tapped by Bill Clinton to become the country’s first female attorney general and who shaped the U.S. government’s responses to the largest legal crises of the 1990s, died Nov. 7 at her home in Miami. She was 78.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, her goddaughter, Gabrielle D’Alemberte, told the Associated Press. Ms. Reno was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1995, while she was attorney general.
Ms. Reno graduated in 1960 from Cornell University and in 1963 from Harvard Law School, where she was one of a handful of women in a class of more than 500. After a stint at a small Miami law firm (she said larger firms passed her by because of her gender), she slowly advanced in private practice, became active in local Democratic politics and was hired by the Dade County State Attorney’s Office in the early 1970s.
The prosecutor’s administrative assistant, Seymour Gelber, assigned her to what he thought was the dead-end job of organizing the office’s juvenile division. “It was an appendage nobody paid much attention to, so I sent Janet over there and figured she would dawdle around like everybody else and write another report,” Gelber told the Chicago Tribune in 1993. “Instead, she pasted the juvenile court together in about two months.”
Protecting children would remain a focus of Ms. Reno’s career. In speech after speech, she connected crime to social conditions such as poverty and a broken school system.
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