I was a Justice on the California Court of Appeal for a quarter century, before retiring for the express purpose of researching and writing a history of civil legal aid in the United States. Praeger published that book as a three-volume set on November 12th, 2013 under the title, TO ESTABLISH JUSTICE FOR ALL: THE PAST AND FUTURE OF CIVIL LEGAL AID IN THE UNITED STATES. The book is ten percent memoir and ninety percent third person history. It is part memoir because earlier in my career I spent several years at the center of the legal aid movement--as a legal aid lawyer, then the first deputy director and second director of the Office of Economic Opportunity's Legal Services Program. This was during the War on Poverty when Sargent Shriver was the OEO Director and my boss. It also was the first time the federal government had supplied public funds to provide some measure of justice to poor people. The acceptance of that fundamental responsibility came late in our nation's history, despite the constitutional promise found in the Preamble that "We the People" would "establish justice" in this nation. Later, while a professor of law at the University of Southern California I was heavily involved in the effort, ultimately successful, to create an independent Legal Services Corporation that could take over the administration of this federal program when the War on Poverty ended. I am now a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California and the Western Center on Law and Poverty. I also continue to be involved in activities related to legal services for the poor and access to justice for low and moderate income Americans--a former chair and longtime member of the California Commission on Access to Justice, as chair of the Sargent Shriver Counsel Project's Implementation Committee, a member of the American Bar Association's Civil Right to Counsel Working Group, as a member of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, and as a member of the International Legal Aid Group, an organization of scholars from around the world who specialize in research on legal aid and access to justice. I was born and raised in Watertown, a town in northeastern South Dakota. It is located about 40 miles from where my grandparents homesteaded in 1881, when that area was still the Dakota Territory, and not yet a State. I earned my B.A. in economics at Northwestern University, attending through a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship, was on the debate team and elected student body president. My three years as a naval officer were spent on the U.S.S Saipan, an aircraft carrier, and on the staff of the Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic. The next two years took me to the University of Chicago Law School, where I graduated after taking classes for nine straight quarters-summers as well as fall, winter, and spring. There I was the book review editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and worked as a half-time research assistant at the American Bar Foundation. I then received a Ford Foundation Fellowship in Criminal Law at Northwestern Law School and earned an LLM in Criminal Law, writing my LLM Thesis on the legal aspects of prosecuting organized crime.This led to a position as a trial lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section and assignments in the Section's field offices in Miami and Las Vegas. Because of a persuasive appeal from a classmate and close friend, Gary Bellow, I made a big career shift, from prosecuting the rich and powerful to helping the poor and powerless, accepting a position as deputy director of an experimental "neighborhood office" program in Washington, D.C.'s low income neighborhoods. A year later, the nation declared a "War on Poverty" and I was recruited to be deputy director of the legal services arm of that war. Eight months after that, the director resigned and I found myself the director of that program. This is how legal services for the poor became my vocation for the next several years and my avocation ever since.