Born in 1932, in a South Dakota trapped under the strain of the Great Depression, Judge Rudi M Brewster has worked as a lawyer and a judge since 1960.

He studied at Princeton as a participant in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps programme; after his graduation in 1954 he was deployed for a tour of duty as part of an antisubmarine attack squadron in the Western Pacific.

In 1957 he enrolled at Stanford Law School in California and three years later began his career as a civil trial lawyer at the San Diego firm, Gray, Cary, Ames & Frye, where he became a partner in 1968. He was called to the bench of the US District Court for the Southern District of California in 1984 and achieved senior status in 1998.

Throughout his career Judge Brewster has presided over many complex commercial lawsuits, including a number of highly publicized aviation disaster cases. In 2000 he was a recipient of the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame Award from the State Bar of California, and in 2005 he was honoured with a Professionalism Award from the American Inns of Court.

During a career that has spanned half a century Judge Brewster has earned the respect of colleagues and peers in the legal profession in America. He is known to demand a high standard of professionalism from lawyers and clerks he works with, and it has been said that the importance he places on the values of integrity and fairness can be dated back to the influence of his family in post-Depression Sioux Falls.

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