Division Seven: JUSTICE EARL JOHNSON, JR.

JUSTICE Earl Johnson, Jr. was born and raised in Watertown, South Dakota. He received his B.A. with Honors in Economics from Northwestern University where he was student body president. After three years active duty as a naval officer, he earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review, while working as a half-time research assistant at the American Bar Foundation. He went on to obtain an L.L.M. in Criminal Law from Northwestern University School of Law, where his dissertation was on the subject of organized crime.

In the twenty years before his appointment as a judge he served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section in Washington, Miami and Las Vegas, a legal services lawyer and eventually Director of the nation's Legal Services Program for poor people, and a Professor of Law at the University of Southern California where he taught evidence, professional responsibility, law and poverty, and criminal trial practice. For several years he directed the USC clinical education program and later also held a joint appointment as a Senior Research Fellow at USC's Social Science Research Institute where he directed a program on dispute resolution policy. During that time, he also was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Florence in Italy co-directing its international access to justice study.

An Associate Justice on Division 7 since that division's creation in late 1982, he has served on the Judicial Ethics Committee and Appellate Courts Committee of the California Judges Association, the board of the Continuing Judicial Studies Program, as President of the National Equal Justice Library, Chair of the State Bar's Access to Justice Working Group, Co-Chair of the California Commission on Access to Justice, and Chair of the Advisory Research Committee of the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation.

Johnson is a member of the Order of the Coif and has received a number of awards, including:

• "Justin Dart Academic Innovation Award" from USC in 1971.
• The California State Bar's first "Loren Miller Legal Services" Award in 1977.
• "Appellate Justice of the Year" Award, from the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Association in 1989.
• "Outstanding Judicial Achievements" Award from Consumer Attorneys of California in 1991.
• Named to "Norwegian-American Hall of Fame" in 1997.
• "Legal Services Pioneer" Award from Los Angeles Legal Aid Foundation in 1999.
• "Appellate Judge of the Year" Award from the Consumer Attorneys of California in 2003.
• "Judge Benjamin Aranda Access to Justice" Award (a joint award from the California Judicial Council, the California State Bar, and the California Judges Association) in 2004.
• Named one of "100 Most Influential Lawyers in California" by the state's leading legal newspaper, the Daily Journal, in 2004.
• "Beacon of Justice" Award, from Los Angeles County Law Library in 2006.
• "Outstanding Jurist" Award from the Los Angeles County Bar Association in 2007.

Johnson is admitted to the bars of Illinois (1960), Ninth Circuit (1964), District of Columbia (1965), United States Supreme Court (1966), and California (1972). During his career he has authored or co-authored sixteen books including CALIFORNIA TRIAL GUIDE, FEDERAL TRIAL GUIDE, JUSTICE AND REFORM, and TOWARD EQUAL JUSTICE, as well as over forty articles including a series on Organized Crime: Challenge to the American Legal System, published in the JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW, CRIMINOLOGY AND POLICE SCIENCE. He has been listed in "Who's Who in America" since 1978 and "Who's Who in the World" since 1982.

Justice Johnson is married to Barbara Y. Johnson, a former Chief Assistant Attorney General who is now a public policy consultant and a neutral in employment disputes. He has three adult children -- Kelly, a clinical psychologist, Eric, a television writer-producer, and Agaarn, an intelligence analyst with the FBI's Counter-Terrorism Center - and two grandchildren, Emma and Camille.

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