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Justice Earl Johnson, JR. |
JUSTICE EARL JOHNSON, JR. was one of the nation's pioneer poverty lawyers - as deputy director of one of four pilot neighborhood lawyer programs the Ford Foundation funded in the mid-1960's to reform the way legal aid was then delivered in the U.S. In 1965 the government declared its "War on Poverty" and he was chosen as the first deputy director and eight months later the second director of the Legal Services Program of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. During his tenure the program grew to 2000 lawyers working out of 850 offices in nearly 300 communities.
Johnson joined the USC law faculty in 1969. While there he drafted the first bill to create a Legal Services Corporation, a bill that three years and many amendments later emerged as the Legal Services Corporation Act of 1974. During this time Professor Johnson also authored a book, JUSTICE AND REFORM: THE FORMATIVE YEARS OF THE AMERICAN LEGAL SERVICES PROGRAM (1974, 2nd edition 1978) and co-authored another, TOWARD EQUAL JUSTICE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LEGAL AID IN MODERN SOCIETIES (1975, 1981) along with a dozen articles about access to justice issues. Reviewers called JUSTICE AND REFORM "undoubtedly the standard book on legal services for years to come" and the author "a careful historian, persuasive evangelist and fearless prophet." At various times from 1973 - 1979 Professor Johnson was a visiting scholar at the University of Florence and the European University Institute and co-directed an international study of how different countries seek to provide equal access to justice to their low-income citizens. This study resulted in the four-volume ACCESS TO JUSTICE set. In 1977 Johnson received the first annual "Loren Miller Legal Services Award," now in its 26th year and considered the California State Bar's highest honor, for his "outstanding leadership in bringing justice to California's poor."
Governor Jerry Brown appointed Johnson to the California Court of Appeal in 1982 as a charter member of Division Seven. By 1994, the late Bernard Witkin, for over fifty years the leading scholar on California law, was writing that Justice Johnson is "unsurpassed by any sitting member of the Court, or indeed, by any distinguished occupants of the appellate bench of past decades." Since joining the court, Johnson has continued writing and working in support of equal justice for the poor. In addition to authoring a half dozen articles in the field the past decade, he recently chaired the State Bar's "Access to Justice Working Group" which produced a major report in 1997, AND JUSTICE FOR ALL. He now serves on the "California Access to Justice Commission" established to implement some of the recommendations in that report and in 2002 co-chaired the Commission. Meanwhile at the national level Justice Johnson was the founding president of the National Equal Justice Library (NEJL) which opened in 1997 at American University in the nation's capital. In 1990, the California State Bar honored him by naming its new fellowship program for young lawyers working in legal services programs the "Earl Johnson Community Law Fellows."
Born in South Dakota, Justice Johnson earned his B.A. from Northwestern where he was student body president, his J.D. from the University of Chicago where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and an L.L.M. in Criminal Law from Northwestern. He is married to Barbara Yanow Johnson, former Chief Assistant Attorney General and now a mediator and independent fact finder, and has three children - Kelly, a clinical psychologist at the University of Washington; Eric, a writer-producer at KING-5 the NBC affiliate in Seattle; and Agaarn, an Intelligence Operations Specialist at the FBI's Counterterrorism Center in Washington, D.C.