The work of Earl Warren and the Warren Court is widely known and fiercely debated for its impact on far-flung fields such as racial equality, privacy, police procedure and voting rights. Less appreciated is that body of work as an expression of Warren’s upbringing – as the leading edge of a period of history in which California shifted from recipient of American problems to crafter of the nation’s future. When he went to the court in 1953, Warren was 62 years old and the most dominant political figure of his generation in California politics. He was not an ideologue but rather a man of experience, and thus the conscience that guided the nation’s new chief justice at that critical moment was one molded from his upbringing in California. Jim Newton, Los Angeles Times City-County Bureau Chief and author of Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, argues that over the 16 years that Warren held his post in Washington, he exported to the nation the values of California Progressivism and the experiences of a Bakersfield boyhood. His remove from the North-South battles over racial segregation helped Warren to break a potentially catastrophic division in Brown v. Board of Education. His insistence on police professionalism was matched by his fury over crime and vice, both products of his early California politics, and that unusual hybrid gave rise to the court’s new paradigm in those fields. Warren is remembered – fondly by some, with irritation by others – as perhaps the most consequential chief justice in American history. He may also be regarded as the man who launched the Californiaization of America.