Author Biographies: California Courts and Judges

California Courts and Judges
Author Biographies	Back to the Book Page

Elizabeth Smith Since graduating from the University of Texas Law School, Ms. Smith has clerked for a California judge, taught as an Adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice, and profiled numerous business executives for two Texas newspapers. Shortly after obtaining her second graduate degree in the 1990s, she spent 18 months working in-house for Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, helping the firm prepare the two-volume treatise Employment Discrimination Law for publication by BNA. She has been designated an "honor roll" contributor to that treatise. For over ten years, Ms. Smith also provided political science and legal research to West Publishing’s Texas Politics series authored by Kraemer and Newell. She later served as sole editor of a judge’s text on arbitration and sharpened her editing skills while working for newspapers in both Texas and California. In addition to her current California Courts and Judges writing tasks, Ms. Smith edits a variety of materials on a consulting basis and contributes freelance articles to a number of prestigious publications, including The Wall Street Journal.

Mark Thompson Mark Thompson graduated from Columbia Law School in 1983 and has been a journalist and writer ever since. He worked as an assistant editor at the Smithsonian Institute's Wilson Quarterly for several years before moving to Los Angeles to take a job at the Los Angeles Daily Journal, where he covered topics ranging from international law to the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote judicial profiles and edited the opinion section. Mr. Thompson left the Daily Journal in 1997 to work full time as a freelance writer and to complete a book, American Character, a biography of the eccentric journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis, which was published in the spring of 2001. His articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines including the Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Economist and Far Eastern Economic Review.