Laura Coates

About

Laura Gayle Coates (born July 11, 1979) is an American legal analyst, attorney and television personality. She has formerly served as a trial attorney for a law firms Faegre & Benson and Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman and a federal prosecutor for the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. Since 2016, she has served as a legal analyst for CNN and became the network’s chief legal analyst in 2023. Since October 2023, she has also hosted a nightly news discussion TV program on the network, Laura Coates Live.

Coates was born on July 11, 1979 in Hartford, Connecticut but was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts until the fourth grade when her family moved to Minnesota. She is the youngest of three sisters. Her father was a dentist. In 1997, she graduated from the St. Paul Academy and Summit School, a private college preparatory independent day school in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In 2001, she graduated with an A.B. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs after completing a 122-page senior thesis titled “The Legacy of Southern Redemption: An Examination of Felon Disenfranchisement Policy” under the supervision of Russ…