Michael Nash’s 30-year career as a jurist has mostly been focused on trying to make life better for Los Angeles County’s children. He is widely credited by lawyers, child advocates and other judges as having measurably improved the juvenile courts in Los Angeles, where he spent two decades serving alternately as the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court and supervising judge of the Juvenile Dependency Court — the latter oversees the fate of Los Angeles foster children.
California’s massive foster care system is the largest in the nation, with 62,097 in foster care as of 2014. (To give you a reference point, New York, which has the next largest system, has 25,397). With 20,651 kids in care, sprawling and complicated Los Angeles County has 30 percent of the state’s foster youth, making it the largest municipal system in the United States, and — after 18 different directors have cycled through LA’s agency in 26 years — it is arguably America’s most chronically troubled.
[For more of this story, written by Gary Cohn, go to http://jjie.org/head-of-las-ne...ic-authority/162328/]
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