Rafael Chodos is a lawyer who has been in solo practice for over thirty years handling sophisticated business litigation and transactional work.  Mr. Chodos represents individuals and small companies against large corporations, and has won major verdicts:  against Bank of America on behalf of a diamond merchant who was induced to lend money to another customer of the Bank who was well on his way to bankruptcy - but the Bank hid this information from the client; against Hughes Aircraft on behalf of the daughter of the former president of the company whom the corporation tried to cheat out of her rightful share of the company's bonus plan; against insurers who refused to pay legitimate claims; against MCA Universal who tried to bully his client with a meritless copyright claim.  In the 1990s he defended an employer against a sexual harassment claim by having the employer sue the prospective plaintiff employees before they filed their action, seeking a declaration that the workplace policies were entirely in compliance with sexual harassment laws (which they were).  This tactic had never been used before and was written up in the Wall Street Journal and later used by many employers.  Rafael Chodos wrote a much-read article about the case titled, "Protecting the Righteous Employer Against Abusive Sexual Harassment Claims."  In addition to practicing law, Mr. Chodos has written thoughtful articles on copyright law and civil procedure.  In 2001, he published The Law of Fiduciary Duties - a 1700-page treatise which has already been cited six times by the California Supreme Court and courts of appeal.  He describes the law as "society's on-going quest for integrity in interpersonal affairs," and has lectured and written often on this topic.

Mr. Chodos is also an authority on religion who has lectured at graduate university seminars, and has published in respected collections of essays on biblical scholarship.  His essays include a recently published analysis of The Book of Job as a multicultural case report (in Probing the Frontiers of Biblical Studies, in the Princeton Theological Monograph Series, Wipf & Stock, 2009); an essay titled "The Cry of Eden" which presents an original analysis of that story in the Book of Genesis (in vol. 1 of the series, Presenting the Past published by Brill/ Leiden, Boston, 2008); an essay titled "Law as Dance, Theater, or Music: Legal Procedure and Ritual" in the Summer 2002 issue of the quarterly, CrossCurrents and reprinted in Procession, Performance, Liturgy and Ritual (Inst. of Medieval Music, Ottawa 2007), and an essay titled, "God Does Not Require Obedience:  He Abhors It" in volume 4 of a collection of essays titled The Destructive Power of Religion(Praeger, Dec. 2003) .  His first book, The Jewish Attitude Towards Justice and Law (dist. E.J. Brill, 1984), was the beginning of his effort to find a deep integration of his interests in law and religion.  

Rafael grew up in a household full of books and music: his father was a prominent rabbi who taught him Hebrew.  He studied Latin in high school, and taught himself classical Greek after completing the Latin curriculum several months ahead of schedule.  He left his family home at the age of sixteen and earned his way through college and graduate school teaching those classical languages.  But on the way he pursued entirely different kinds of adventures:  he worked as a halibut fisherman in Alaska and stood guard on deck with a rifle to ward off pirates; he was a construction worker for a while in Alaska and Oregon. Through his marriage to his second wife, Junko, a Japanese-born painter and visual artist who has exhibited in one-person shows in galleries and museums, he learned about the visual arts.  In the 1990s he lectured on "Masculine and Feminine Aspects of Art and Law" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and in 2001 he published the award-winning catalog of his wife's  one-person exhibit at the Long Beach Museum of Art, Metamorphoses: The Transformative Vision of Junko Chodos.  Mr. Chodos has produced a short film featuring her art (Cry of Ecstasy, 2005) and he composed the music for some short animations he produced in 2007 and 2008, featuring her art.  Furthering his effort to integrate art and religion, in 2008, Mr. Chodos published a stunning e-Book titled Centripetal Art/ Matrix of Growth and in 2009, he published a spinoff, print version.  He is the author of many essays and short stories, some of which can now be found on Amazon's Kindle.

In 2005 and 2006, Mr. Chodos hosted a radio talk show in Phoenix, Arizona, titled "The No Small Talk Show." In 2008, he was invited to design and then teach a course on "Law, Ethics, and the Enterprise" at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.  He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley (1964).  After college he worked for IBM as a programming trainee and spent fifteen years in the then-fledgling computer software field.  He founded and operated a computer firm in the 1970s (long before the days of the personal computer) that developed expert systems using artificial intelligence techniques to design very large telecommunications networks, and he signed up thirty-five of the Fortune 50 companies as customers.  He sold the company but continued to manage it while he returned to law school and completed his law degree at Boston University School of Law while continuing to work full time in the software field.  He retains a lively interest in software and computers and he published his fiduciary duties treatise both in print and on CD-ROM.