Letitia James

Letitia James, 67, was born in Brooklyn and earned a psychology degree from Lehman College (1981), a law degree from Howard University (1987) and a master's in public administration from Columbia University (2003). She began as a Legal Aid Society public defender, served on Mario Cuomo's task force and became an assistant attorney general in 1999. She was elected to the New York City Council in 2003, became Public Advocate in 2013 and was re-elected in 2017, and has been state Attorney General since 2019. On the Council she sponsored the Safe Housing Act, which pushed landlords to improve conditions in the city's worst buildings, and helped expose corruption in the CityTime contract. As Public Advocate she banned salary-history questions in city hiring and pushed the city's largest pension fund to divest from gun and ammunition retailers. Her office says it collected more than $1.22 billion for New York in 2024 and led an Organized Crime Task Force that broke up nine gun and drug trafficking rings in 14 counties. She has led multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration to protect federal workers and funding for New York, and her campaign cites $628 million recovered for Medicaid.