My mom talked me into getting involved in politics after I graduated law school. After dropping out of Rutgers twice, and serving in the military, I got my degree from Rutgers and decided to go to law school. My mom accused me of going to law school to avoid getting a job. She was right!

After law school, I shunned offers from Wall Street firms and worked for legal services representing poor folks and migrant farm workers. The workers living quarters were in sheds next to stored pesticide containers. Their champion was Senator Byron Baer.

My law degree has help me serve the public. I won a landmark Women’s Rights decision, Ponter v. Ponter, which recognized a women’s right to choose every medical decision involving her body, going beyond Roe v. Wade. I sued the petrochemical industry, Lesniak v. The United States, and made them pay into the fund I established to help cleanup our state’s abandoned toxic waste sites. Currently I’m before the New Jersey Court of Appeals to overturn Governor Christie’s Settlement with ExxonMobil and my legislation is before the United States Supreme Court to allow our casinos and racetracks to have sports betting,  just as Nevada does. During the Super Bowl and the NCAA Tournament you can’t get a room in Las Vegas, while Atlantic City is a ghost town, and our racing industry, which provides thousands of jobs and the most acres of open space for horse farms in the country, is in a continual decline.

I got to the Legislature by good luck and hard work. I want to commend the legislators with whom I served over these past forty years. None of us are perfect, as is no one on the face on the earth, but those who put their lives in the public forum deserve more praise than they get from the public and from the press.

During my time in the Legislature I  worked with my colleagues not as Democrats or Republicans, or as liberals or conservatives, but as servants of the public, not as servants of our political parties or ideological beliefs.

I sponsored the most significant environmental protection laws in the nation signed by Governors Brenden Byrne and Tom Kean.

Senator Weinberg and I were in the vanguard of equality for the LGBT Community, along with Assemblyman Ben Mazur and LGBT icon Steven Goldstein, and my partner, Civil Rights Commissioner Salena Carroll.

Senator Cardinale and I, along with Assemblyman Greenwald,  teamed up to stem the tide of auto insurance companies leaving New Jersey and brought competition into the auto insurance market place to hold down  costs, under legislation signed by Governor McGreevey.