Gary L. Smith Jr. (born August 27, 1972), is an American attorney from his native Norco in St. Charles Parish,

Louisiana Louisiana ( ; ; ) is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It borders Texas to the west, Arkansas to the north, and Mississippi to the east. Of the 50 U.S. states, it ranks 31st in area and 25 ...

, who is a former Democratic member of the

Louisiana State Senate The Louisiana State Senate (; ) is the upper house of Louisiana’s legislature. Senators serve four-year terms and participate in various committees. Composition The Louisiana State Senate has 39 members elected from single-member districts ...

for District 19, a position which he held from 2012 to 2024. He succeeded the term-limited Democratic Senator Joel T. Chaisson, II.

Personal life and education

Smith graduated in 1990 from Destrehan High School in Destrehan in St. Charles Parish. In 1994, he earned a

Bachelor of Business Administration A Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) is an undergraduate degree in business administration awarded by colleges and universities after completion of four years and typically 120 credits of undergraduate study in the fundamentals of busine ...

degree from

Louisiana State University Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as Louisiana State University (LSU), is an American Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louis ...

Baton Rouge Baton Rouge ( ; , ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Louisiana. It had a population of 227,470 at the 2020 United States census, making it List of municipalities in Louisiana, Louisiana's second-m ...

. He earned his

Juris Doctor A Juris Doctor, Doctor of Jurisprudence, or Doctor of Law (JD) is a graduate-entry professional degree that primarily prepares individuals to practice law. In the United States and the Philippines, it is the only qualifying law degree. Other j ...

from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in 1998 and an

LLM A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

from Tulane Law School in 1999. He is married to Katherine Mosley, the granddaughter of U.S. Senator Russell Long and the great-granddaughter of Louisiana Governor

Huey Long Huey Pierce Long Jr. (August 30, 1893September 10, 1935), nicknamed "The Kingfish", was an American politician who served as the 40th governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and as a United States senator from 1932 until his assassination i ...

Career

Smith interned for

Senator A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or Legislative chamber, chamber of a bicameral legislature. The name comes from the Ancient Rome, ancient Roman Senate (Latin: ''Senatus''), so-called as an assembly of the senior ...

John Breaux John Berlinger Breaux (; born March 1, 1944) is an American lobbyist, attorney, and retired politician from Louisiana. He served in the United States House of Representatives, U.S. House of Representatives from 1972 to 1987 and as a United State ...

and Congressman Billy Tauzin. Smith was elected to the

Louisiana House of Representatives The Louisiana House of Representatives (; ) is the lower house in the Louisiana State Legislature, the state legislature of the U.S. state of Louisiana. This chamber is composed of 105 representatives, each of whom represents approximately 4 ...

in 2000, and to the

in 2012.

References

External links

Vote Smart page

Ballotpedia profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Gary Jr. 1972 births Destrehan High School alumni Living people Louisiana State University alumni Loyola University New Orleans College of Law alumni Democratic Party members of the Louisiana House of Representatives Democratic Party Louisiana state senators People from Norco, Louisiana Tulane University Law School alumni 21st-century members of the Louisiana State Legislature