The Journey
The Man With a Heart.
The Candidate With a Soul.
Mike Malak’s path to the bench is anything but ordinary. He was offered a full scholarship to Georgetown Law and turned it down — he couldn’t afford the flights back and forth to see his widowed mother, so he stayed in California to be near her. He earned his B.A. and M.A. at Loyola Marymount, and his J.D. at Valley University School of Law: a small institution founded by sitting judges of the Los Angeles Superior Court’s Central District who wanted to leave their imprint on legal education. Two of its founders later rose to the California Supreme Court and to the presiding bench of California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal.
There were twenty in Mike’s graduating class. F. Lee Bailey — then one of the country’s most celebrated litigators (disbarred years later) — gave the commencement speech in the Rose Garden of the Ambassador Hotel. His charge to the class was simple: “Don’t do it just for the money. Do it to make a difference.” Mike has carried that line with him ever since. He began his career not in a corner office but in a seminary, where he was taught to be all things to all people — to be ready for anything, to live with nothing, and to fight for those who could not fight for themselves.
That calling led him from Hollywood to the courtroom. As Director of Marketing for Daily Variety, he quintupled the publication’s revenues in five years and managed the Oscar campaigns for Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — two of the most celebrated films in cinema history. He received the Key to the City of San Diego and a California Senate Resolution of Commendation. He served on State Advisory Commissions for Motion Pictures and for Business Insurance. As a civilian contractor for the Department of Defense, he filmed flight test verifications of carrier-based anti-submarine warfare aircraft over the Pacific.
One quiet achievement of those years still rides through Los Angeles every day. During the Southern California Rapid Transit District’s build-out of Metro Rail, Mike was the moving party in directing two percent of the system’s $3.3 billion construction budget — roughly $66 million — into station artwork commissioned from local artists. Every Metro Rail station carries that work today. It is the same discipline of partnerships, persuasion, and patient follow-through that he intends to bring to the bench.
But it was his work with those the system forgot — the mentally ill, the addicted, single mothers with small children cast aside — that defines who Mike Malak truly is.
For decades, he has represented the people nobody else would take on. Not for money — most could never pay. Public defenders didn’t want them. Judges disliked them. Prosecutors ignored them. Mike showed up anyway. He put them through diversion programs, fought for their dignity, and held the system accountable when it failed them.
Now he seeks the bench — not for prestige, but to bring the same patient listening, scholarly rigor, and talent for forging consensus that have earned him respect on both sides of the courtroom. He is admitted to the State Bar of California and practices before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the California Central and Northern District Courts.
Faith and family run together for Mike. His cousin Daniel E. Sheehan was the first native Nebraskan to serve as Archbishop of Omaha and President of Boys Town — consecrated a bishop at thirty-eight, seated almost beside the newly-raised John Paul II inside the doors of the Vatican. The archbishop never planned on the priesthood; he was a paid semi-pro pitcher headed for the majors when a line drive to his hand ended his baseball career and turned him toward the church. Gifted at finance, he refused to live in the splendor of the archbishop’s mansion and sold it off, with its furnishings, for the poor.
