About RJ Smith
RJ Smith has been an editor for Los Angeles Magazine and The Village Voice, and a contributor to Spin and Details. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, Elle, GQ, Grand Royal, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of four books, including The One: The Life and Music of James Brown and the upcoming Chuck Berry: An American Life. A former Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute and Community Scholar at USC, Smith lives in Los Angeles.
Articles written by RJ Smith
The Ties That Bind
Brian Neary came from a 'city of hope' and it hasn’t left himDecember 11th, 2019 was a tough day to be talking about the law in Jersey City. So maybe it was the right day for it, too. Two assailants, one reportedly linked to the Black Hebrew Israelites group, killed a detective before storming a Jewish business in a targeted attack. Six people, including the shooters, died. The shooting hit close to the heart for criminal defense attorney Brian Neary. “That’s the neighborhood where I grew up, it’s five blocks away—the Catholic grammar …
Calming the Waters
Robert Brandt tries to lower temperatures in family law cases and raise them at the ping-pong table“Taking a punch can hurt,” says Robert C. Brandt. He adds, after thinking for a moment, “It depends on the punch.” Brandt knows a little something about the topic. His father, Teddy, the son of Hungarian immigrants, was a professional boxer on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1930s. Teddy won most of his 10 professional fights, and he and his pugilist brother Murray “The Ozone Park Ghost” Brandt, battled with flair. They were Jewish, in a time of rising anti-Semitism …
The Wading Game
From fly-fishing to courtrooms, Carey Matovich wades instead of floats, and it’s made all the differenceThere’s a frequent debate among those who fly-fish in Montana. You’d think everything was fine as long as you caught a few, but how you fish might say a lot more than what you catch. One camp floats, on a boat, maybe nursing a cold one and moving with the waves. One camp wades, all in, wet and most likely freezing. Matovich Keller & Huso founder Carey Matovich knows her camp. “I wade,” she says. It’s the thinking behind it that she likes. “You have to read the water and think …
Call of Duty
Seattle litigator John Devlin makes sure the needs of Rangers and their families don’t get overlookedIn 1989, John Devlin, a member of the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, was parachuting into Panama to conduct advance jungle training a few months before the U.S. would invade the country and remove dictator Manuel Noriega from power. A memory stayed with him. “There was a guy I served with who got wounded on the invasion jump,” Devlin says. He was paralyzed from the waist down. Devlin contributed to a fundraising effort to buy him a modified vehicle so he could drive using only his upper …
The Master
Philip X. Wang brings a chess-champion mind to patent lawIt’s an inevitable question. Philip X. Wang is an intellectual property litigator at Russ August & Kabat in Los Angeles who also happens to be the 2011 California state chess champion, and who holds the title of International Master—a rung below Grand Master—in the official World Chess Federation (FIDE) classifications. So people want to know: How much does chess have in common with the law? Wang’s answer: Not much. “Law is way more complicated than chess,” he says. “There can …
The Housing Authority
Antoinette C. Oliver’s collaborative Landlord Tenant Project has helped thousands navigate the public housing systemPro bono work is often about dropping into an unfamiliar situation and quickly doing the best you can. But Antoinette C. Oliver has done so much of it that she has become an authority on the ways housing law does and doesn’t work. Oliver helped create and today manages the Landlord Tenant Project, a collaboration of Arconic Inc., Alcoa Corporation and her firm, Meyer, Unkovic & Scott. The project helps residents understand how to navigate the public housing system and the ins and outs of …
Our Man in Nicaragua and Guatemala and Germany
Aaron Freiwald wrote his way through the world before taking to the lawAaron J. Freiwald’s early career seems scattershot: a freelance writer traveling Central America; a Court TV pioneer; and the author of a nonfiction book on the capture of a Nazi war criminal. But Freiwald sees continuity. “I’ve always thought of myself as an investigative journalist,” says the managing partner at Freiwald Law. “I feel that there are piles of documents somewhere in a file cabinet, and that if I can get to those dark and hidden-away places and shed some light, then I …
The Unsticking Point
How Miriam Barish arrived at the intersection of law and genderMiriam Barish was enjoying a thriving career as a personal injury lawyer at Philadelphia’s Anapol Weiss when a specialty presented itself at the intersection of law and gender. The horrific breakthrough case involved two women who shared an apartment and wanted to hire a cleaning service. The management agency for the property recommended a man, who suggested he work directly with the women rather than through the property-management company. “It was fairly assumed the agency had vetted …
Larry Spiller Kimmel's Second Chance
After Wilmington attorney Paul Spiller, his wife and two of his three children were killed in a plane crash, Spiller’s law partner (and brother-in-law) Mort Kimmel adopted the only survivor, Larry Spiller Kimmel, who has been paying it forward since.We left on New Year’s Eve of 1987, flying into Rutland, Vermont, from Wilmington to go skiing on a family vacation. It was my mom and dad; my younger brother, 5; my older brother, 14, and me. I was 9. My dad was an experienced pilot and we’d flown together many, many times. But as we were flying, we were diverted because ice was accumulating on the wings. We needed to get to a bigger airport in Burlington, where it would be safer to land. I was in the front with my dad, sitting in the …
Wearing the White Hat
Former Marine K. Knox Nunnally still works toward the greater goodK. Knox Nunnally tells a story from when he was a Marine infantry officer logging three combat deployments to Iraq. It says a lot about who he is. “My great contribution to the war on terror is the Kevlar groin protector,” says Nunnally, now a partner at Ware, Jackson, Lee, O’Neill, Smith & Barrow in Houston. Back in 2004, Nunnally was deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, and—like his fellow infantrymen—was expected to wear a cumbersome array of protective plates attached to his vest when …
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