THE MISSIONARY

By Amelia Hansen

It's 80 degrees at 10 a.m. in Tongatapu, Tonga's main island, about a three-hour flight from New Zealand. Some 40 judges from around the Pacific Rim are waiting in dark suits and bright flower leis for the arrival of King George Tupou V. Women in attendance fan themselves with programs. A group of school kids wearing vibrant red dance costumes waits in a patch of shade across the lawn.

Eventually, a black London taxicab pulls up and the king emerges from the backseat. Educated at Oxford and Sandhurst, the royal military academy, Tupou V has a taste for things both foreign and modern. But his country, until recently one of the last absolute monarchies in the world, is firmly rooted in the past. Wearing dark sunglasses and a beige tupenu?a sarong-like garment worn with a ceremonial woven mat?the king finally addresses the audience assembled for the 17th Pacific Judicial Conference, held in late 2007.

"The Pacific region has gone through a period of instability during efforts to wrestle power away from legally appointed authorities," Tupou says in steady, British-accented English. "But it is comforting to know that throughout these periods of instability the judiciary has remained independent and its integrity unassailable."

Tupou is not explicit, but he is likely referring to pro-democracy protests that had roiled Tonga the previous year. Within this archipelago nation, a growing faction of its 112,000 residents wants the king to share his power with the people.

J. Clifford Wallace?seated in the front row beside his wife, Jenee?is well acquainted with the pomp and circumstance of such ceremonies and the platitudes of foreign rulers. Now a senior judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Wallace first visited courts abroad in the People's Republic of China in the late 1970s. He has since traveled to some 60 countries, advising judiciaries on everything from combating corruption to implementing mediation programs to staving off interference by a military president. His pioneering work in the international rule of law movement predates the American Bar Association's initiative in Eastern Europe by 20 years.

The silver-haired judge, who turned 80 last December, is revered as one of the world's leading experts on judicial administration. In Thailand, Wallace is referred to as "father of the courts." The chief justice of Guam considers himself "blessed" to have Wallace's guidance. And after King Tupou's speech, Tonga's chief justice?an expatriate New Zealander named Tony Ford?heralded Wallace as the conference's savior.

"This event was looking a bit disorganized when Cliff and I had breakfast at a hotel in Hong Kong back in June," Ford observed. "He said that if Tonga needed any help, don't hesitate to call. I called."

Wallace enjoys a following in the United States as well, at least among conservatives. Appointed to the Ninth Circuit by President Richard Nixon in 1972, he has taken stands in his legal writings against affirmative action, abortion rights, and physician-assisted suicide. According to a 2006 study, Wallace was the least likely of the circuit's judges to grant asylum, voting in favor of asylum seekers only 4 percent of the time. A frequent speaker for chapters of the Federalist Society and the American Enterprise Institute, on more than one occasion he was considered for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2005 he received the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award?the most prestigious honor in the federal judiciary?and more than 60 of his former clerks turned out for the presentation.

However, Wallace's legacy, as he views it, is not his work on the bench. "No one will remember my opinions," he said during an interview in Tonga. "But I think they will remember my contributions abroad."

Some of those contributions are more visible than others. In Thailand, for example, Wallace helped establish a new judicial training center. In Guatemala he helped implement a traveling court system?a judge and a mediator aboard a bus?to serve the country's rural areas. And perhaps most notably among his accomplishments, he advised the Chinese government on creating a special economic court to handle business cases.

Much of Wallace's work is of a very technical, behind-the-scenes nature. He consults on case management filing systems, alternative dispute resolution programs, and funding mechanisms for judicial training. He is a quintessential nuts-and-bolts man. If the rule of law is a vehicle for democracy and freedom, Wallace is more concerned with what's under the hood.

The rule of law movement does have its critics. The term is vague, its aims can be maddeningly elusive, and it retains some taint from covert associations during the Cold War. Thomas Carothers, vice president of studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., and a leading critic of recent rule of law programs, contends it is extremely difficult to understand how law functions in a society and how it can change. In a 2003 paper for the endowment, Carothers claimed that "rule of law prac-titioners have been following an institutional approach, concentrating on judiciaries, more out of instinct than well-researched knowledge."

Wallace's approach may be institutional, but his motivations could not be more personal. A devout Mormon and former president of the San Diego California Temple, he considers his overseas work part of his service to God. This is his mission.

A few days into the judicial conference in Tonga, the judges gather for dinner at Consular House, formerly the home of the British high commissioner. The elegant white house is illuminated with soft lights. Waiters in white gloves pour glasses of wine and gin and tonics. Once Princess Pilolevu, the king's sister, arrives and has been seated, the guests follow suit. The minister for justice and attorney general, a stout woman named Alisi Numia Afeaki Taumoepeau, announces that Judge Clifford Wallace will offer a blessing before the meal. Wallace rises from his chair across the table from the princess, bows his head, and begins his prayer.

Wallace became a believer early on. Born in 1928, he grew up poor in San Diego. His father, a Canadian immigrant with a third-grade education, was abusive and alcoholic. His mother, a high school dropout, bore the brunt of her husband's rage. Wallace says he tried to "absent" himself from the situation, and found a new life in religion. As a teenager, he had met a Mormon student and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. There he discovered community, acceptance, and structure. He became interested in reading and school. He was on a new path. "To believe in the Heavenly Father makes a significant difference in your attitude," he says.

Following high school graduation, Wallace spent three years in the U.S. Navy as an aviation electronics technician. Despite his poor high school grades, the Navy experience helped him get into San Diego State University. He graduated in 1952 with honors and distinction, then earned his law degree at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall in 1955. He practiced for 15 years as a civil litigator at San Diego's Gray Cary Ames & Frye before President Nixon appointed him to the federal bench in 1970.

To a large extent, Wallace credits his achievements to his religious conversion. And it was through the prism of faith that he came to view another life-changing event: In his 20s he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that causes severe fatigue and muscle weakness. In some cases it can be fatal. Wallace received counsel from the church, and an elder encouraged him to think about God's wishes.

" 'Take the responsibility to carry out His will and you will have the health to do it,' " he recalled being told. Since then, Wallace has been able to control the disease with medication, only occasionally requiring extended periods of rest. Still tall, lean, and athletic, he jogs six days a week and views his well-being as confirmation that he is doing God's work.

Until he took senior status in 1996, Wallace consulted with foreign courts using his vacation time. His compensation: a business-class ticket and a decent hotel room. Jenee?a striking woman in her 70s?accompanies her husband on most of his overseas trips, usually flying economy.

Wallace crossed paths with the rule of law movement early in his career, though he may not have called it that. The phrase "rule of law" first surfaced in the American vernacular during the Cold War. In 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated May 1?celebrated as International Workers' Day in much of the world?as Law Day and Loyalty Day in the United States. In his official proclamation, Eisenhower wrote, "The reason is to remind us that we as Americans live, every day of our lives, under a rule of law."

Law Day was a festive precursor to the law and development movement of the 1960s, which was based on the belief that law could be used to foster democracy and economic development in the newly decolonized states of Africa and Asia. Coupled with the Kennedy administration's New Frontier and volunteer programs such as the Peace Corps, the movement rode the idealism of the decade and then fizzled. According to the Carnegie Endowment's Carothers, even some of its proponents admitted that transplanting the American legal system abroad couldn't be easily done.

Wallace, meanwhile, developed a passionate interest in judicial administration. As a new member of the Ninth Circuit, he was intrigued by the inner workings of the court and its ability to cope with rapidly increasing case filings. "During my 32-year tenure on the Court of Appeals," he wrote in a recent law review article, "I have watched the circuit's appeals more than quintuple from 2,258 to 12,872 filings a year." Wallace came to advocate case management and alternative dispute resolution as tools for avoiding gridlock.

Invited by the U.S. State Department in the early 1980s to Taiwan and the Philippines, Wallace participated in a seminar on Philippine case backlogs presented by the Asia Foundation, a nonprofit agency. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Haydn Williams, then president of the San Francisco?based foundation, heard Wallace speak and was impressed. "That resulted in some discussions, and finally my appointment as the foundation's senior adviser for judicial administration," Wallace says.

The Asia Foundation, too, had Cold War roots. It began in 1951 as the Committee for Free Asia, with the goal of pushing back the new communist regimes in China and North Korea. According to a government report, the group was an ostensibly private body sanctioned by the National Security Council and covertly supported by funds from the Central Intelligence Agency. Though it reorganized in 1954 as the Asia Foundation, it continued to be funded primarily by the CIA until 1967, when the U.S. media uncovered the association. President Lyndon Johnson then arranged for support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Ford Foundation, and private donors.

These days, the Asia Foundation receives funding from a number of private and public sponsors, including Boeing, Chevron, Coca-Cola, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the United Way. Gordon Hein, its vice president of programs, calls the group's link to the CIA "ancient history." He points to the foundation's long-standing involvement in Asia and its commitment to working closely with local partners. Law reform, he says, is just one area of interest.

"Our tagline is, 'Working to build a peaceful, prosperous, just, and open Asia-Pacific region,' " Hein says. "Our founders were wise enough to open permanent offices in Asia, to know what the opportunities are, and to have a long-term view of the rule of law."

In 1976 Wallace studied judicial administration for three months at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Even today, he can't really explain what it was about the subject that captured his imagination. "When I practiced law, I didn't want to have anything to do with administration," he says. "I started thinking about it after I became a judge. I think I was interested more in the philosophy of how you put together an administration and still keep all the interests in line. That's the kind of thing I do overseas."

On one of his first Asia Foundation trips, Wallace met with senior members of the Supreme People's Court in the People's Republic of China. Chairman Mao Zedong had died in 1976, and China was in the throes of repairing the damage done to its institutions by the Cultural Revolution.

"For me it was all new, and I was being very careful about what I did," Wallace says. "When I first went there, there were no law schools, no lawyers. The Cultural Revolution had sent all the lawyers out to become farmers. I was dealing with retired military people in the courts."

The Chinese wanted to attract Western investment but realized that foreigners were wary of the country's undeveloped legal system. Wallace counseled them to create a special economic court accessible to foreign investors. "I told them they had a choice," he says. "They could train every judge in China, or set up a specialty court. I'm not a fan of specialty courts, but it just seemed to me so obvious because none of their judges were lawyers. And we had the resources to do training."

Money for the project, Wallace says, initially came from the Asia Foundation and later from USAID. In 1979 the Chinese government issued the Sino-Foreign Equity Joint Venture Law, at the same time creating courts and standards for judges and attorneys. It was considered one of the country's first major steps toward embracing the rule of law.

Wallace has since worked in other communist countries, including, most recently, Vietnam. There, as in China, he employed a kind of cultural relativism that allows him to encourage the rule of law without coming across as an imperialist. "I didn't keep any secrets?I don't admire the communist doctrine," Wallace says of his trip to Hanoi this past March. "That's up to them. I see my role as trying to make their judicial government more effective, make it more independent, and little by little, to have the rule of law obeyed."

At Wallace's recommendation in 1984, the Conference of Chief Justices of Asia and the Pacific was established to provide a forum for interaction and cross-fertilization on important common issues. With funding provided by the Asia Foundation, the first conference was held in Malaysia in August 1985, and biennial conferences have been held ever since. In 1991 the foundation helped develop a first draft of the Beijing Statement of Principles of the Independence of the Judiciary, which has been adopted by 32 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union gave the rule of law movement its biggest boost since the Eisenhower administration. In 1990 the ABA launched the Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI), funded by the ABA's international law section, USAID, the U.S. Information Agency, and the National Endowment for Democracy?a creation of the Reagan administration that had been used to funnel money to opposition groups in Latin America and Europe. Within three years CEELI had sent more than 1,500 U.S. lawyers, judges, and law professors to host countries from Latvia to Kazakhstan.

"They take ideas and develop them," Wallace says of CEELI. "I'm more of a short-term person. I go in and do a needs analysis and give ideas."

Wallace, working primarily in Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and Africa, had little contact with CEELI projects. "I've got a wrench in my hand and I'm trying to make the machine work better," he says. But he's no ordinary mechanic. His powerful supporters include Justice Tassaduq Jillani of the Supreme Court of Pakistan; Lord Harry Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales; and Aharon Barak, the former chief justice of Israel's supreme court.

In Bangkok, Wallace's Judicial Training Institute now serves as a hub for judges in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has traveled with Wallace, tells of riding with a Thai judge who pointed to the training center building and said simply, "Judge Wallace."

During his many trips to Thailand, Wallace has taught mediation to chief judges from different parts of the country and encouraged them to adapt the techniques to their local culture. He helped the judiciary establish its first alternative dispute resolution program. And, significantly, he worked with the country's chief justice to restructure procedures of the Thai Supreme Court. "I started talking about this ten years ago," he says gleefully. "Patience!"

In 2003 Wallace traveled to Guam, a U.S. territory 3,700 miles west of Honolulu. After meeting with Philip Carbullido, then the chief justice of Guam, Wallace offered to do a needs assessment for the court, which was struggling to pay for judicial training. "It was a blessing to our island's jurisdiction that he was taking the time and interest in us," says Carbullido, now an associate justice on the court.

Wallace supported a congressional measure amending Guam's constitution to recognize the judiciary as a third branch of its government. He also worked to ensure federal funding for judiciaries in Guam and elsewhere in the Pacific region, including the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, American Samoa, Palau, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas.

Wallace has helped draft legislation to create judicial independence in Mongolia, counseled on combating corruption among judges in Tanzania, and organized exchanges and conferences across the globe, from East Timor to Israel to Guatemala.

"He has made more trips than any other judge in the history of the United States. It's staggering," says retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has worked with Wallace in Bahrain and other countries. "No one has done what he has done in terms of improving judicial systems around the world."

In 2007 the ABA consolidated its five overseas programs into the Rule of Law Initiative. ROLI currently has more than 400 staff working in 40 countries, including such nondemocratic nations as China, Egypt, and Turkmenistan.

The modern rule of law movement also includes a multitude of nonprofit organizations, such as Lawyers Without Borders; private groups such as San Francisco's DPK Consulting; and wealthy individuals such as San Francisco plaintiffs attorney Fred Furth, who in 1993 founded the International Judicial Conference on Justice and the Rule of Law.

But some question the focus, direction, and effectiveness of these many programs. Carothers at the Carnegie Endowment, for instance, challenges the premise that there is necessarily a link between the rule of law and nation-building. He points to China as a case that defies the argument that a country will be unable to attract foreign investment if it does not have the rule of law.

"[T]he largest recipient of foreign direct investment in the developing world happens to be a country notorious for its [violations of] Western-style rule of law," he wrote in a well-known article.

Carothers also dismisses the idea that promoting commercial activity within an authoritarian regime enhances the rule of law more broadly in civil society. That argument, he says, appeals to donors who want to promote international business yet defend themselves against charges they are assisting regimes that violate human rights. "To achieve real change," Carothers said in an interview, "you must address the underlying power structures that are choking off the possibility of judicial independence."

Jerome Cohen, a professor at New York University Law School and codirector of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, says that China in particular represents a real challenge. "It's not clear when or whether China will ever have a judicial system that functions the way an independent courts system does," he says.

Cohen began studying Chinese criminal law in the 1960s, published several books on the subject, and last year appeared with Wallace on a panel on U.S.-China relations. Currently an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Cohen concedes that rule of law programs in China are controversial because of that nation's ongoing record of human rights abuses. But he refuses to criticize Wallace's nonjudgmental approach. "Wallace is a sophisticated guy," Cohen says. "He's doing the best he can. None of us can reform the political institutions of China."

Erik Jensen, codirector of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School and a senior law advisor for the Asia Foundation, points to problems caused by the inherent vagueness of the term "rule of law." In Building States to Build Peace (2008), Jensen argues that overly ambitions goals have led to proliferation of rule of law programs purporting to reform everything from courts and legislatures to police and real property administration. "We expect too much, too soon, with too little money," he writes. "There is too much emphasis on technical precision, and too little on the embedded political, economic, and cultural dynamics that surround institutional change."

Wallace, for his part, acknowledges there is "no quick fix" in rule of law work. But he insists on the primacy of the need to develop economic rights, whatever a country's political system. "As people become more powerful economically, political rights usually have a tendency to follow," he says. "It doesn't happen as day follows night, but it does happen over time."

Rob Boone, director of the ABA's ROLI program, supports that approach. "It's important to make progress where you can make progress," Boone says. "Promoting the rule of law benefits people in every corner of the world, not only in terms of strengthening legal systems and human rights, but also in improving sustainable economic and social development."

One afternoon in late March, Judge Wallace opens the door to his chambers at the court of appeals courthouse in San Francisco to greet a visitor. "Come in and make yourself at home," he says, briefly disappearing into a back room to finish a phone call. His chambers are decorated with artifacts from his travels and a faded color photograph of his family, which, based on the butterfly collars and Wallace's dark hair, appears to have been taken in the 1970s. A painting of Jesus, Christ Appearing to the Nephrites, hangs on the wall next to his desk.

Wallace, now a statelier version of the man in the photo, reenters the room. He has been on the phone with Justice Kennedy, whom he's trying to recruit for a judicial conference in Thailand. The two traveled to Bangkok in 2005 to meet with the five chief justices of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries, and Wallace is eager to return. "Four years ago, we were trying to get interest in the ASEAN conference but couldn't do it. Now there's interest in funding it."

In an hour, Wallace must leave for the airport to catch a plane back to San Diego, where he has lived most of his life. After spending a week in Thailand, two weeks in Vietnam, and then hearing cases for a week in San Francisco, he's ready to go home.

Since Wallace's trip to Tonga almost two years ago, King George Tupou V has forfeited most of his powers of appointment to parliament, promising changes that are scheduled to take effect in 2010.

Reminded of his remark in Tonga that he would be best remembered for his work abroad, Wallace replies, "There are 28 active judges writing opinions on this [Ninth Circuit] court, and they're very competent people. But there are very few judges who have spent 30 or 40 years doing judicial administration work overseas. I'm the one that went. My timing was right, and my interest was there."

So was his motivation to be of religious service. "I know what religion has done for me," he says. "I don't have a messianic complex, that I'm going to solve everything. On the nights when I look back, I have a feeling that some good has been done, but not enough. That's what gets me on the plane the next time."

Amelia Hansen is a freelance writer and former reporter for the San Francisco Daily Journal.

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