Eric Berkowitz

Eric Berkowitz's career as writer, lawyer, and journalist has been marked by both meticulous scholarship and uncompromising advocacy.
 
After obtaining degrees in modern European history and law, Eric spent more than 20 years practicing as a trial lawyer in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
 
In 2004, at the apex of his legal career and at the age of forty-six, Eric left his firm and enrolled in the master's program at USC's Annenberg School of Journalism. Almost immediately, he began to publish news and investigative pieces in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Business Journal, and, via the Associated Press, dozens of other newspapers and magazines nationwide. Among his accomplishments were a cover piece in the LA Weekly about the venal, racist roots of Los Angeles's pathetic transport network and a controversial magazine piece for the Los Angeles Times on corruption in California's sprawling "private" court system. He also covered gangland murders and unscrupulous public-interest lawyers, and contributed to AP's stock of obituaries for the not-yet dead.
 
Finishing at the top of his class at USC, Eric took a job on the editorial staff of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, one of the United States' most important daily legal publications. After the Times piece came out, however, the Daily Journal bristled at the potential loss of advertising revenue from private judging groups and Eric realized the situation could end only one way. He left the Daily Journal and took his family to Paris for what he thought would be a one-year sabbatical. It turned into three years. As his wife painted and his daughters evolved, he wrote Sex and Punishment. Well before the first draft of the book was completed, it drew more than its share of interest. The prestigious magazine of the worldwide writers' association PEN International published an excerpt on ancient Rome's vestal virgins, while a group of Eastern European journalists invited Eric to Sofia, Bulgaria to speak about the book's feminist dimensions. (At the same time, Eric was featured in Bulgaria's influential Her magazine.)