Raphael Justice, who graduated from Rice University in 1990 and Yale Law School in 1993, served as an editor for the Yale Law Journal and later became a senior editor for the Journal of Law Yale. Although he is currently a judge or lawyer, he is actually the fourth generation of his family to live in Southern California.
Raphael Justice started his legal career as a law clerk for the Honorable Nathaniel R. Jones, a litigator who practiced as an appellate and trial lawyer in the national law firm’s office in Washington, D.C. Later, he worked as a litigator for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States.
Raphael Justice worked as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School, teaching courses in advocacy and writing. During the 1996 Presidential election, he also served as investigative counsel for the United States House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, handling the investigation of a fundraising campaign that arose from that time.
In the course of a government investigation into sports steroids, other athletes were successfully prosecuted and investigated for illegal leaks of grand jury testimonies, including Barry Bonds. Raphael Justice was appointed as a special counsel in the Northern District of California, San Francisco. He also spent over twelve years as an Assistant United States Attorney prosecuting felony cases in the Central District of California, before returning to Los Angeles in 1999.
During his time as an attorney, Justice Raphael frequently gave lectures on writing appellate briefs and presenting oral arguments. In 2008, he collaborated with another individual to teach a seminar on criminal sentencing. From 2005 to 2006, he co-taught an advanced course on advocating for appeals at the Gould School of Law at the University of California. Personally, Justice Raphael argued 41 cases in the Ninth Circuit on behalf of the United States, which included three cases presented to an 11-judge panel. As the chief, Justice Raphael was responsible for overseeing roughly 300 briefs and 100 oral arguments in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on an annual basis. After serving as the deputy chief from 2005 to 2007, Justice Raphael then took on the role of chief of the Criminal Appeals Section from 2007 to 2012 while working as an AUSA.
Justice Raphael was appointed twice to serve as a pro tem Justice in Division Five of the Second District Court of Appeal while on the trial court. During his last three years on the trial bench, he was assigned to a civil independent calendar court downtown, dealing with a wide range of civil cases. Following that, he worked in the downtown civil “law and motion” courts, which handled pretrial cases for the entire county, focusing on limited civil and personal injury cases. Initially, on that court, Justice Raphael was responsible for small claims, limited civil, unlawful detainer, and criminal misdemeanors. In 2012, Governor Jerry Brown appointed Justice Raphael as a Judge on the Los Angeles Superior Court.
In 2018, Raphael Brown, who received an exceptionally high rating of “qualified” from the Commission Evaluation Nominees Judicial, was unanimously confirmed by the Judicial Appointments Commission. He was nominated by the Governor to serve as an Associate Justice on the Court of Appeal.
Raphael Justice has frequently spoken at events and taught several judicial education courses for attorneys. He has also authored several dozen articles in legal publications, both on the appellate and trial bench.
Justice Raphael is married to a lawyer who practices law, and they have two sons who are of school age.