Justice Earl Johnson, Jr

Justice Earl Johnson, Jr. recently retired from the California Court of Appeal after a quarter century District and is now a “Scholar in Residence” at the Western Center on Law and Poverty, where he is researching and writing two books about legal aid and access to justice issues. During his pre-judicial career he was a federal prosecutor with the Organized Crime Section of the U.S. Department of Justice while Bobby Kennedy was the Attorney General, a legal services lawyer in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood office program, the Director of the OEO Legal Services Program when Sargent Shriver was the OEO director during the “war on poverty” era, and a Professor at USC Law Center where for several years he held a joint appointment as a senior research associate at USC’s Social Science Research Center. During that time he also co-directed (with Mauro Cappelletti) an international access to justice study at the University of Florence (Italy).

While he was the director of the War on Poverty’s Legal Services Program in the mid-1960s it grew to 800 offices with 2000 lawyers in 300 communities supported by a system of national and state support centers, several of which still exist, and staffed with many skilled and highly motivated lawyers, some of them recruited through the Reginald Heber Smith Fellowships the program established. Then as a professor at USC, Johnson and his colleague, Gary Bellow, started a clinical program that served poor people as well as educating students. He also authored or co-authored five books, including JUSTICE AND REFORM (recounting the early years of the OEO Legal Services Program and the creation of the Legal Services Corporation) and TOWARD EQUAL JUSTICE (the first book-length comparative study of civil legal assistance in countries around the world) along with a dozen articles about legal aid and access to justice. Johnson played a prominent role in the legislative efforts to create the Legal Services Corporation that succeeded the OEO Legal Services Program in 1975 and later California’s IOLTA program.

During his quarter century as an appellate judge, Johnson c chaired the state bar’s Access to Justice Working Group that led to the creation of the California Commission on Access to Justice which Johnson chaired in 2002. At the national level, he was the founding president of the National Equal Justice Library now located at Georgetown Law School in the nation’s capital. While on the bench, he also wrote another half dozen articles about legal aid and access to justice issues. After his retirement, Johnson was appointed to the ABA Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants where he currently chairs its “Right to Legal Services” sub-committee.

Johnson received the first Loren Miller Legal Services Award from the California State Bar in 1977 and the Aranda Access to Justice Award in 2004. During his judicial career, he received three “Appellate Justice of the Year” awards and the Los Angeles Bar’s “Outstanding Jurist” award, for his work as an appellate judge.