Cultivating Justice in the Garden State

Anyone looking at the first two decades of his life would never have predicted Ray Lesniak would reach the highest levels of New Jersey state government, become a friend of US presidents, serve forty years in the New Jersey State Legislature and become Democratic State Chairman and New Jersey Chair of the Clinton/Gore and Gore/Lieberman campaigns for President. He had neither the family finances nor the ambition to predict that he would achieve such prominence. His father, John D. Lesniak, quit school in 8th grade and took a job as a dockworker in Elizabeth, NJ. His mother, Stephanie, worked as a housecleaner. Growing up, the future state senator displayed little apparent ambition. He dropped out of Rutgers -- twice. But, after serving in the US Army, he finally graduated Rutgers and went on to matriculate at St John's Law School. After a stellar academic showing in law school, he was adopted by a political mentor, Katharine Ma" Green, a machine politician who championed the causes of Polish American immigrants and their families. Green secured the new law school graduate a job as Staff Attorney with the Office of Poverty and the Law, Department of Community Affairs, State of New Jersey in Trenton. In his role as a public litigator, Lesniak argued the landmark Ponter v. Ponter case which established a woman's right to choose any medical procedure involving her body, in this case a sterilization operation. Lesniak's career in electoral politics began when he was elected to the State Assembly in 1983. Asan assemblyman, he sponsored some of the most stringent environmental protection laws in the country, advanced significant criminal justice reforms, including abolishing the death penalty, and championed same sex marriage"--