Tickets to see Loretta Lynch, the first African-American woman to serve as Attorney General of the United States and an accomplished former federal prosecutor, go on sale starting February 7, 2019.
Tickets go on sale February 7, 2019, and are $15 each of free with an Elon ID by calling Elon University’s Center for the Arts Box Office at (336) 278-5610.
Distinguished Leadership Lecture featuring Loretta Lynch
Thursday, February 28, 2019
6:30 p.m.
Elon Law Library (201 N. Greene Street in Greensboro)
Loretta Lynch served as the 83rd Attorney General of the United States from 2015-2017, capping a highly distinguished career over the previous three decades.
Appointed to the role by President Barack Obama in 2015, Lynch had twice previously served as the head of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, under both President Bill Clinton and Obama. Described by 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 a number of tough issues.
As the first African-American woman to serve in the role, Lynch improved the relationship between local law enforcement and the communities they serve, and she took bold stances on criminal justice reform. She had spent years rising through the ranks as a prosecutor, 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. 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.
A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, Lynch is the daughter of a school librarian and fourth generation Baptist minister. She has shared that she was inspired at a young age 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.