In 1997, Governor Christine Todd Whitman appointed Farmer as Chief Counsel, after having served as Deputy Chief Counsel and Assistant Counsel to the Governor. Farmer was nominated to be New JerseyAttorney General on March 15, 1999, and was sworn in the following June after being confirmed unanimously by the New Jersey Senate. He continued to serve under Donald DiFrancesco after Whitman's resignation.
Acting Governor
Farmer served as Acting Governor for 90 minutes on January 8, 2002. Following Governor Christine Todd Whitman's resignation the previous year to become head of the EPA, Farmer was one of four people to serve as acting governor for the one-year period between Whitman's resignation and Jim McGreevey's inauguration, along with three different senate presidents. DiFrancesco served as acting governor for all but the last week of this period, when his term as senate president ended with the mandate of the outgoing senate on January 8, 2002, while newly elected governor Jim McGreevy would not be inaugurated before January 15, 2002. The state did not have the position of lieutenant governor until 2010, and succession rules specified that the next in line for governor after the Senate President and the Speaker of the Assembly, which both became vacant on January 8, would be the Attorney General until the next Senate President could be sworn in. This automatically made Farmer Acting Governor. Republican Bennett and Democrat Codey became Co-Presidents of the Senate on the same day, because the Senate had been evenly split between the two parties, and then divided the last week of the term among them as Governor, with Bennett serving from January 8, 2002 to January 12, 2002; and Codey serving from January 12, 2002, to January 15, 2002. As a result, the state had five different people serving as governor during a period of eight days.
Later career
Farmer subsequently acted as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean and former Indiana Congressman Lee H. Hamilton. Most recently, Farmer has served as Dean of Rutgers School of Law–Newark. In his tenure, Farmer, in conjunction with the Rutgers Law Review, planned a multi-day symposium to address the many legal uncertainties in post-9/11 national security policy and practices. The symposium featured Thomas Kean, Michael Chertoff, and Judge John Joseph Gibbons, among other scholars and national security leaders. He has also welcomed two United States Supreme Court Justices-- Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito—to the Law School for exclusive speaking engagements. Prior to his deanship, Farmer practiced law as a partner in a North Jersey firm he founded, and was an adjunct professor of law at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark. He also regularly contributes to The Star-Ledger and appears in The New York Times, among other publications. Farmer's book, , was released days before the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In "The Ground Truth," Farmer made the following controversial statement: "At some level of government," says Dean Farmer, "at some point in time, a decision was made not to tell the truth about the national response to the attacks on the morning of 9/11. We owe the truth to the families of the victims of 9/11. We owe it to the American public as well, because only by understanding what has gone wrong in the past can we assure our nation's safety in the future." On January 21, 2010, he appeared on The Colbert Report. In July 2011 he was appointed the 13th member of New Jersey's Congressional Redistricting Commission by both its Democratic and Republican members. New Jersey lost one Congressional seat in redistricting and the panel redrew the congressional districts, determining which seat was lost. On April 11, 2013, he was appointed as the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Rutgers University. On August 19, 2019, Farmer was appointed by Chancellor Christopher J. Molloy to succeed Ruth B. Mandel as the director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.
