Loretta Elizabeth Lynch was born May 21, 1959 in Greensboro, NC to a family drawn to service and activism. Her father was a fourth-generation Baptist minister and her mother, an English teacher and school librarian. Her grandfather, a sharecropper, assisted those seeking to escape punishment under Jim Crow laws. Ms. Lynch later recalled how her father, active in local civil rights issues, took her to watch legal proceedings at the courthouse in Durham, North Carolina.
Lynch received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1981. Three years later, she earned a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School.
Lynch joined the New York City, New York law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel in 1984. Six years later, she became a drug and crime prosecutor in the office of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. From 1994 to 1998, she directed the Long Island office and worked on several cases involving corruption in the government of Brookhaven, New York.