JUSTICE EARL JOHNSON, JR.

Justice Earl Johnston, JR. was one of the pioneer poverty lawyers in the United States, serving as deputy director of one of four pilot neighborhood law office programs the Ford Foundation funded in 1963-64. The U.S. government then declared its "War on Poverty" and Johnson was chosen to be the first deputy director and eight months later the second director of the OEO Legal Services Program. In 1969 he became a professor of law at the University of Southern California where he also directed an interdisciplinary program on dispute resolution policy. At various times from 1973 to 1979 he was a visiting scholar at the University of Florence and the European University Institute where he co-directed (with Mauro Cappelletti) the Access to Justice project. In 1982 he was appointed to the California Court of Appeal where he still serves.

Johnson has written extensively on legal aid and related issues including Justice and Reform: The Formative Years of the American Legal Services Program (Russell Sage, 1974, Transaction Books, 1978) and Toward Equal Justice: A Comparative Study of Legal Aid in Modern Societies (with Cappelletti and James Gordley) (Guiffre/Oceana, 1975, 1981) and a dozen articles. Johnson also was the founding president of the National Equal Justice Library (NEJL) located at American University and remains an active member of the Library's executive committee, including chairing its International Collections Committee.

His most recent publications in the legal aid field are "Justice and Reform: A Quarter Century Later", Chapter 1 of Regan, Paterson, Goriely & Fleming, The Transformation of Legal Aid: Comparative and Historical Studies (1999); "Equal Access to Justice: Comparing Equal Access to Justice in the United States and Other Industrial Democracies," 24 Fordham International Law Journal 83 (2000); and, the "Access to Justice" article in Elsevier's forthcoming International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2001).