John Farber

Farmer was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1957. He attended Georgetown University receiving a B.A. degree in 1979 and a J.D. degree in 1986. After law school he worked as a clerk for New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Alan B. Handler. From 1988 to 1990, he was an associate in the law firm of Riker, Danzig, Scherer, Hyland & Perretti in Morristown. From 1990 to 1994 he was an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.

In 1997, Governor Christine Todd Whitman appointed Farmer as Chief Counsel, after having served as Deputy Chief Counsel and Assistant Counsel to the Governor.

Farmer was nominated to be New Jersey Attorney General on March 15, 1999, and was sworn in the following June after being confirmed unanimously by the New Jersey Senate. He continued to serve under Donald DiFrancesco after Whitman's resignation.

Farmer served as Acting Governor for 90 minutes on January 8, 2002. Following Governor Christine Todd Whitman's resignation the previous year to become head of the EPA, Farmer was one of four people to serve as acting governor for the one-year period between Whitman's resignation and Jim McGreevey's inauguration, along with three different senate presidents (Donald DiFrancesco, John O. Bennett, and Richard Codey). DiFrancesco served as acting governor for all but the last week of this period, when his term as senate president ended with the mandate of the outgoing senate on January 8, 2002, while newly elected governor Jim McGreevy would not be inaugurated before January 15, 2002.

On January 21, 2010, he appeared on The Colbert Report.

In July 2011 he was appointed the 13th (and tie-breaking) member of New Jersey's Congressional Redistricting Commission by both its Democratic and Republican members. New Jersey lost one Congressional seat in redistricting and the panel redrew the congressional districts, determining which seat was lost.

On April 11, 2013, he was appointed as the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Rutgers University.

On August 19, 2019, Farmer was appointed by Chancellor Christopher J. Molloy to succeed Ruth B. Mandel as the director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.