Roraback was born March 29, 1960, in Torrington, Connecticut. He is the cousin of the late Catherine Roraback, a civil rights attorney in Connecticut best known for representing Estelle Griswold and Dr. C. Lee Buxton in the 1965 Supreme Court caseGriswold v. Connecticut, which legalized the use of birth control in Connecticut and created the precedent of the right to privacy. Roraback is married to Kara Dowling and they reside with their son Andrew Kevin in Goshen.
Education
Roraback attended public schools in Torrington and in Litchfield, and then high school at the Hotchkiss School. He graduated cum laude from Yale University in 1983, and in 1987 earned a J.D. from the University of Virginia Law School. He returned to Torrington in 1988 to work with his father, brother and sister at the family law firm of Roraback and Roraback, which was founded in 1883 by his great-grandfather.
In 1994, 1996, and 1998, Roraback was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives, in the 64th Assembly District. His district then included the northwest-corner towns of Cornwall, Goshen, Salisbury, and Sharon, which provided about half of its population; the remainder of his constituents lived in Torrington, mostly outside the more densely populated south-central portion of that town—and made up about one third of that city's population.
Connecticut Senate
In 2000 Roraback was elected as senator for the 30th Senate District. It then included the whole of Torrington, the rest of his former Assembly district, plus eight towns and parts of two others in western Litchfield County; Torrington and the district's portion of New Milford accounted for about 55% of the district's population. In each of the five succeeding elections, the most recent in 2010, he was re-elected to the redistricted 30th Senate District. that district embraces a part of Torrington similar to what had been in his Assembly district, 13 other Litchfield County towns, and Brookfield in Fairfield County. In June 2007, Roraback was elected Deputy Minority LeaderPro Tempore and Minority Caucus Chairman of the State Senate. Roraback's General Assembly committee assignments as of 2012 include:
In addition to his leadership role on the Finance Committee, Roraback has been widely recognized for his work on education, domestic violence, agriculture and environmental issues. In 2006, Senator Roraback was honored by being named to the Aspen-Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership as one of the nation’s top young elected officials. In the seventeen years that he served in the Connecticut General Assembly, Roraback never missed a roll call vote, casting 8,468 consecutive votes. Roraback was the only one out of 187 legislators who could claim this record.
In early 2010, Roraback explored seeking the office of Attorney General of Connecticut that fall; in April he announced that nine of his fellow senators and several mayors had offered their support, but he would seek re-election to the state Senate instead.
In October 2011, Roraback announced his campaign for Connecticut's 5th congressional district seat in Congress. As the Republican convention approached, he won several more influential endorsements for the party's endorsement and the nomination, including that of Nancy Johnson, the last of their party to hold the seat. He was endorsed by former governor M. Jodi Rell on September 4, 2012. At the congressional district's convention in May 2012, Roraback won the Republican endorsement with 53% of the delegates' votes. Three other Republican contenders—Mark Greenberg, Lisa Wilson-Foley, and Justin Bernier—each received enough votes to have the right to require that the party's nominee be the winner of a primary election, which was held on August 14; Roraback, and all of the other three, appeared on the primary ballot. Roraback won 32% of the votes cast, exceeding his nearest opponent by 5 percentage points. Roraback secured general election endorsements from numerous newspapers across the state, including the Register-Citizen, Danbury's News Times, Waterbury's Republican American, the Litchfield County Times, the New Haven Register, and the Housatonic Times. In the general election, Roraback was defeated by Elizabeth Esty, a Democrat who had been a one-term member of the Connecticut House of Representatives.
Superior Court Judge
In 2013, Roraback was appointed by Governor Dannel P. Malloy to be a Connecticut Superior Court Judge. He currently serves in the Waterbury Judicial District.
