Judge Michael Craig Small received his B.A. in history from the University of Michigan in 1982 and his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1986 while serving as editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Review. After graduation, he obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study international human rights law in Great Britain and also worked at Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering from 1986 to 1993. Thereafter, he worked in the Office of Legal Counsel to the U.S. Justice Department and then as a deputy associate attorney general from until 1997. He was then a visiting faculty member at UCLA Law School, teaching courses on constitutional law, until he became chief counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in 1999. From there, he became senior counsel at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld in 2002, becoming a member of the California bar that same year. He has been on the board of directors of the Western Center on Law and Poverty, the president of the Los Angeles Lawyers’ Chapter of the American Constitution Society, and a member of the Human Rights Watch California Committee-South. He was appointed to the bench in 2015 by Governor Jerry Brown and is a democrat.
Links
Los Angeles Superior Court – Courtroom Rules
The Robing Room – Hon. Michael C Small
Michael C. Small – Ballotpedia
Brown Names 12 Judges, Four to Los Angeles Superior Court – Metropolitan News-Enterprise