The seventy-eighth attorney general of the United States and the first woman to hold the position, Janet Reno had a high profile and often controversial tenure. Born on July 21, 1938, in Miami, Florida, Reno was the eldest of the four children of journalists Henry and Jane Reno. Reno's father, a Danish immigrant, was a police reporter for the Miami Herald, and Reno's mother was an investigative reporter for the now defunct Miami News.

After graduating from local public schools, Reno attended Cornell University. She graduated with a degree in chemistry in 1960, then entered the Harvard University Law School, from which she graduated in 1963. In 1962, she had been denied a summer job by a prominent Miami law firm because she was a woman; later, in the mid-1970s, she became a partner (part of a group that directs a firm's activities) of that same firm. She worked with...