Background and career
Andrew Peter Napolitano (born June 6, 1950) is an American retired jurist and syndicated columnist whose work appears in publications including The Washington Times. Napolitano served as a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995. He also served as a visiting professor at Widener University Delaware Law School, Seton Hall University School of Law, and Brooklyn Law School. He is a libertarian and has gained prominence in part due to his criticism of the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Beginning in 1997, he became an analyst for Fox News, commenting on legal news and trials. He has written nine books on legal and political subjects. He was let go by Fox in 2021 due to sexual harassment allegations and now hosts his own Youtube show Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom.
Napolitano was born in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated with an A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1972 after completing a senior thesis titled "An Essay on the Origin and Evolution of Representative Government in the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1644." He received his J.D. from Notre Dame Law School and was admitted to the New Jersey bar in 1975. After law school, he entered private practice as a litigator. He first taught law for a brief period in 1980–1981 at Delaware Law School (now Widener). He sat on the New Jersey bench from 1987 to 1995, becoming the state's youngest then-sitting Superior Court judge. Napolitano resigned his judgeship in 1995 to return to private practice. He served as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University School of Law for 11 years, from 1989 to 2000. He served as a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School from 2013 to 2017. Napolitano told friends in 2017 that President Donald Trump told him he was considering him for a United States Supreme Court appointment should there be a second vacancy. Ultimately, Judge Brett Kavanaugh was chosen instead.
Before joining Fox as a news analyst, Napolitano was the presiding judge for the first season of Twentieth Television's syndicated court show Power of Attorney (2000–2002), in which people brought small-claims disputes to a televised courtroom. Differing from similar formats, the plaintiffs and defendants were represented pro bono by famous attorneys. He departed the series after its first season. From 2006 to 2010, Napolitano co-hosted a talk radio show on Fox News Radio with Brian Kilmeade titled Brian and the Judge. He hosted a daily libertarian talk show called Freedom Watch that aired on Fox Business Channel. Frequent guests on Freedom Watch were Congressman Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell and Peter Schiff. He promoted the works of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in his program. The show originally aired every Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. on Fox News' Strategy Room and from September 14, 2009, aired three to four times a week. On June 12, 2010, it debuted as a weekly show on Fox Business. It was one of several programs dropped in February 2012 when FBN revamped its primetime lineup. Napolitano regularly substituted for television host Glenn Beck when Beck was absent from his program. After Beck announced that he would be leaving Fox News, he asked Napolitano to replace him. He regularly provided legal analysis on top rated shows on both Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, such as The Kelly File, The O'Reilly Factor, Varney & Co., The Fox Report with Shepard Smith, Fox & Friends and Special Report with Bret Baier until an appearance on March 16, 2017, related to a then-postulated conspiracy theory involving President Trump's accusation that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped him. On March 20, 2017, the Los Angeles Times reported that Napolitano was pulled off the air indefinitely because of the wiretapping claims; however, it was unclear whether Napolitano would return to the air or whether it was just a temporary move to remove him from the news cycle. He returned to the air on March 29 and stood by his claims concerning British intelligence. A 2020 book by CNN reporter Brian Stelter asserts that Attorney General William Barr met with Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch in October 2019 to request that Murdoch "muzzle" Napolitano and that Napolitano's Fox appearances have been limited since that meeting. Napolitano was let go from his position as a contributor to Fox News in August 2021 after allegations of sexual harassment filed by a Fox Business production assistant. During his 24-year tenure as Fox News' Senior Judicial Analyst, Napolitano appeared on air more than 14,500 times, a record for any on-air personality at the network. After his career in television, Napolitano started his own Youtube show Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom which, as of 2025, has over 625,000 subscribers.
Napolitano is anti-abortion and holds that abortion "should be prohibited." He reasons that while a woman has a natural and undeniable right to privacy in her personal choices, the rule of necessity causes the right to life of the fetus, which he believes to begin at conception, to take priority for the duration of gestation. He believes the Supreme Court's ruling on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia (1967) set a precedent that would also require state recognition of same-sex marriage. He opposes capital punishment, saying, "I don't believe that the state has the moral authority to execute." He is a believer in the separation of Church and State. With respect to both presidents Bush and Obama and their handling of civil liberties in the war on terror, Napolitano is a strong critic. In both his scholarly work, appearing in the New York University School of Law Journal of Law and Liberty, and in his book Suicide Pact, he criticized the actions of both presidents and their parties concerning torture, domestic spying, unilateral executive action and encroachments on political power. After the release of the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Napolitano said the report showed that Trump engaged in numerous instances of obstruction of justice. However, the report deliberately refused to make a firm conclusion about obstruction of justice accusations. According to The New York Times, Napolitano "has a taste for conspiracy theories". The Washington Post has described him as a "purveyor of conspiracy theories." In 2010, Napolitano said, "It's hard for me to believe that it (7 World Trade Center) came down by itself... I am gratified to see that people across the board are interested. I think twenty years from now, people will look at 9/11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us."
Napolitano has made numerous controversial claims about the Civil War. Napolitano expressed disdain for Abraham Lincoln on Fox News, saying, "I am a contrarian on Abraham Lincoln." Napolitano has also claimed that slavery, while one of the most deplorable institutions in human history, could have been done away with peacefully due to being an already dying institution. Napolitano sees the Civil War as Abraham Lincoln's war by choice. More specifically, in a Daily Show segment, he said that Lincoln started the war "because he wanted to preserve the union, because he needed the tariffs from the southern states," a claim rejected by a panel of three distinguished historians of the Civil War: James Oakes, Eric Foner and Manisha Sinha. Napolitano argued that Lincoln could have solved the slavery question by paying slaveholders to release their slaves, a method known as compensated emancipation, thereby avoiding war. Lincoln did offer to pay to free the slaves in Delaware, but the Delaware legislature rejected him. He also asserted that Lincoln attempted to arm slaves, but two prominent historians of the Civil War said they had never heard of such an effort and PolitiFact rated the claim "pants-on-fire". He has asserted that slavery was dying a natural death at the time of the Civil War, a claim that Eric Foner on the Daily Show panel rejected. Foner said, "Slavery was not only viable, it was growing ... This idea that it was dying out or was going to die out is ridiculous." In his book Suicide Pact, Napolitano focused his criticism of Lincoln on the precedent set by his specific constitutional violations, such as his unilateral suspension of the right to habeas corpus and his institutionalization of military commission systems for civilian crimes. Napolitano has also said that Lincoln enforced the Fugitive Slave Act "until the Civil War was over" by sending escaped slaves back to their owners. PolitiFact notes that "while there were cases when Lincoln enforced the law during the Civil War, he did so selectively when he thought it would help keep border states in the Union fold. When it came to slaves from Confederate states, the weight of the government actions fell heavily on the side of refusing to return escaped slaves." Furthermore, his claim that Lincoln enforced the act "until the Civil War was over" was indisputably false, as the Fugitive Slave Act was repealed in June 1864, more than ten months before the end of the war.
Napolitano subscribes to a natural law jurisprudence that is influenced by a respect for originalist ideas and methods. He has expressed strong sympathies with the Randy Barnett new originalist vein of originalism, as it incorporates the natural law through an original understanding of the Ninth Amendment. He has published a favorable column on Barnett's idea of a constitutional presumption of liberty. Napolitano's philosophy generally leans towards strong originalism while not accepting the limitations of the older types of originalism espoused by Robert Bork and Justice Antonin Scalia concerning the Constitution's open-ended provisions like the Ninth Amendment. He finds such limitations too restrictive on a judge's ability to apply the natural law to decide cases where the individual's liberty is at stake. He is a strong believer in economic liberties. He argues that Lochner v. New York was overruled in error in the West Coast Hotel case, as the Contracts Clause and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process clauses protect a sphere of personal economic liberty. In September 2015, Napolitano was the featured speaker at a conference held by the Republican government watchdog group Judicial Watch.
