Louis Westcott Myers was born in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, in September 1872, earned his bachelor’s and law degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Phi Beta Kappa, and practiced in Madison and Chicago before making a risky move to frontier-era Los Angeles in 1898. After 15 years in private practice he was appointed to the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 1913, then won election to keep the seat in 1914 and again in 1920.

This episode traces his rapid rise from trial judge to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California in January 1923 and Chief Justice in April 1924, his unopposed statewide election that October, and his surprising resignation on January 1, 1926, to join the Los Angeles firm of Henry W. O’Melveny. It also covers his 1938 argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in NLRB v. Mackay Radio and Telegraph Co., his family life, his honorary degrees, and the short fishing book he published in 1951.

• Why a well-positioned Chicago lawyer would gamble on Los Angeles in 1898, when the city was a fast-growing frontier town full of water rights and land grant disputes
• How two vacancies created by Curtis D. Wilbur’s promotions carried Myers from county judge to Chief Justice in roughly 15 months
• What appellate practice involves and why a former chief justice became so valuable to a private firm, which added his name to become O’Melveny & Myers by 1939
• The stakes of the 1938 Mackay Radio labor case over replacing striking workers under the Wagner Act
• His marriage to Blanche Brown in 1901, his test-pilot son John Westcott Myers, honorary doctorates from USC and the University of California, and his 1951 book An Incomplete Angler