A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA School of Law, Taylor was a public defender and criminal prosecutor in Los Angeles County before entering private practice.

[2] He was also counsel to the California Supreme Court in the Onion Field murder case, and an independent Special Prosecutor retained by the Attorney General of Montana to conduct a one-year grand jury probe of government corruption from 1975 to 1976.

[1] Taylor was voted "professor of the year" during his tenure at Gonzaga University School of Law in Spokane, Washington from 1982 to 1985.

On July 25, 2002, Taylor was presented with the NCDD's "Lifetime Achievement Award" at Harvard Law School.

On or before October 4, 2023 at their home in Naples, Long Beach, he shot and killed his wife, 75 before committing suicide.