2008 Presidential Election Coverage

 GOGO POLITICS

Joseph Biden, Jr.

Joseph Robinette "Joe" Biden, Jr. (born 20 November 1942) is an American lawyer and politician from Wilmington, Delaware. He is a member of the Democratic Party and the incumbent senior U.S. Senator from Delaware. Biden is currently serving his sixth term and is Delaware's longest-serving Senator. He is the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the 110th Congress, has served in that position in the past, and has served as Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. He has officially filed as a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination in the 2008 presidential election.

Biden, the first of four siblings, was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr. and Catherine Eugenia Finnegan, and was raised in his Irish American mother's Catholic religion. The Biden family moved to Delaware when Biden was 10 years old, and he grew up in suburban New Castle County, Delaware, where his father was a car salesman. In 1961, Biden graduated from Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware and, in 1965, from the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. He then attended Syracuse University College of Law, graduated in 1968, and was admitted to the Delaware Bar in 1969.

In 1966, while in law school, Biden married Neilia Hunter. They had three children, Joseph R. III (Beau), Robert Hunter, and Amy. His wife and infant daughter died in an automobile accident shortly after he was first elected to the U.S. Senate. His two young sons, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured in the accident, but both eventually made full recoveries. Biden was sworn into office from their bedside. Persuaded not to resign in order to care for them, Biden began the practice of commuting an hour and a half each day on the train from his home in the Wilmington suburbs to Washington, DC.

In 1977, Biden married Jill Tracy Jacobs. They have one child, Ashley, and are members of the Catholic Church. In February 1988, Biden was hospitalized for two brain aneurysms which kept him from the U.S. Senate for seven months.

Biden's elder son, Joseph R. "Beau" Biden, III, was a partner in the Wilmington law firm of Bifferato, Gentilotti, Biden & Balick, LLC and was elected Attorney General of Delaware in 2006. He is a captain in the Delaware Army National Guard, where he serves in the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps. Biden's younger son, R. Hunter Biden, works as a lawyer in Washington, DC, serves on the board of directors of Amtrak, and previously worked in the Commerce Department.

Since 1991, Biden has also served as an adjunct professor at the Widener University School of Law, where he teaches a seminar on constitutional law.

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