While a student at Stetson University College of Law in Spring 1959 and president of the Student Bar Association, I had the privilege of introducing Dean Harold Leon “Tom” Sebring to an audience of 100 or so lawyers and judges. I summarized Dean Sebring’s background and finished by saying, “I now introduce to you Tom Sebring, a former judge of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, former justice and chief justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, the dean of our law school, and former head football coach of the University of Florida.” As I said this, the audience burst into laughter. The dean stood, smiled at me, approached the podium, put his hand on my shoulder, and thanked me for the introduction. I had introduced Dean Sebring this way in all seriousness to emphasize how much he had achieved, but to the members of the audience it must have seemed inconceivable that the same person could have been a highly acclaimed jurist, a law school dean, and also the head coach of a national collegiate football power. Surely no one person could have such a multi-faceted career, they must have thought. However, Dean Sebring did all of this and much more. He is one of the most versatile figures in the history of our State and Nation, and to me and others who were his students, he was an outstanding teacher and a great dean.
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Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, remarked, “There is an appointed time for everything.” The confirmation of that ancient truism is found in the more modern adage that the convergence of time and place are most often the key to success. The advent of The Law Student Practice Rule (The Rule) in the State of Florida can be attributed to its formulation in accordance with the dictum of that modern maxim. The Rule, having been conceived at the right time and in the right place, suffered a longer than normal gestation period, but its birth produced a unique facet of legal education that intrinsically possesses enduring qualities.
A tribute to the beginnings of clinical education must begin with a special tribute to Dr. Paul Barnard, who is truly the father of clinical legal education as it exists today in the State of Florida. Anyone attempting to write an article about the beginnings of clinical education in law schools would do a disservice if he did not recognize Dr. Barnard as the creator of the newly defined clinical process of legal education in the United States.
The centennial of Stetson University College of Law is an appropriate time to look back at the origins of what is now one of the school’s most prominent institutions, the Stetson Law Review. In existence for only the last 30 of the law school’s 100 years, the Law Review had humble beginnings, functioning from 1970 to 1978 as the Stetson Intramural Law Review, with no nonstudent works and with circulation limited to the College of Law’s students, faculty, and alumni. Yet, these early years provided the necessary foundation for the Law Review’s subsequent achievements and are worth studying for that reason alone. Moreover, the story of those years details the trials and tribulations of the students and faculty who labored to help the enterprise succeed; trials and tribulations that their successors should record and recognize before memories further fade.
Stetson University College of Law’s trial advocacy program has gained much national attention and acclaim during the last decade of the school’s first century, but excellence in trial advocacy is not something new for its graduates. Long before U.S. News & World Report named Stetson’s Trial Advocacy program number one in the nation, Stetson was producing some of the most capable and successful trial lawyers found in any court system. This Article primarily addresses the trial advocacy program at Stetson for the past twenty years, the time frame most familiar to the Author. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Stetson produced many great trial lawyers and judges long before the more recent national attention to our program, alumni who in no small part have contributed to the position of prominence that Stetson’s trial advocacy program enjoys as it begins its next 100 years.
I thought it would be both interesting and useful in this fourth installment in the continuing Three Ring Circus saga to explore in some depth four subjects that have never been totally clear to me. I do so in the hope that, in addition to improving my understanding, this effort will be helpful to others who also find these subjects somewhat of a puzzle. Therefore, this Article will evaluate the origins of the balancing of interests test, revisit the Commerce Clause in its dormant state and the balancing of competing interests, reexamine the intermediate scrutiny of gender-based classifications, and return to the idea of similiarity of situation.
It is a thrill to celebrate with you as you complete your law school career and begin what I believe is the most rewarding professional career available. In the short span of three years, you have gone from being students to graduates, and shortly, when you have passed the bar examination, as I am sure you will, to being lawyers. I like lawyers. They are my heroes and heroines. There is not a day that goes by that I am not deeply proud to be a lawyer.
My name is John Loftus. It is probably kind of silly to have an Irish-Catholic as president of the Holocaust Museum. A lot of us wonder why we even have a Holocaust Museum for Jews. Every ethnic group has genocide. What was the largest number of people killed? During the middle passage of slavery, tens of millions of Africans died during the slave trade. What ethnic group had the highest percentage of their people killed? It was not the Jews; it was the Armenians. One out of every three Armenians in the world died in Turkish deportations in World War I.
The goals recited above are certainly laudable, but when these goals clash, who is the proper party to decide which goal carries more weight with respect to our Nation’s public policy? The first quote comes from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and provides the rationale behind Congress’s enactment of a broad sweeping statutory scheme meant to eradicate discrimination against the disabled and ensure that disabled individuals have equal opportunities and access to public accommodations. The second quote is from the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA). Congress recognized that tribal gaming provides a much needed source of income to Native American tribes and sought, through the IGRA, to enact a statutory scheme that would provide for economic self-sufficiency and protect tribal gaming from corruption so that the tribes could reap the economic benefits of such gaming enterprises.
“A year after the restoration of Louis XVIII, a visit was made by the inspector-general of prisons.” In 1998 a Florida appellate court considered the post-conviction relief request of a prisoner named Wilton Dedge in Dedge v. State. “‘I do not know what reason government can assign for these useless visits; when you see one prisoner you see all—always the same thing—ill-fed and innocent.’” Two of three appellate judges on the Dedge court affirmed the trial court’s denial of Dedge’s request. The court did not issue a majority opinion. Dedge contends he is innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted in 1984. “‘I must conscientiously perform my duty.’ . . . ‘Let us visit this one first.’” The lone dissenter in Dedge, Judge Winifred J. Sharp, wrote a three-page opinion that revisited the trial, explored a new scientific test, Polymerase Chain Reaction Deoxyribonucleic Acid (PCR DNA) analysis, considered the applicability of the new test to Dedge’s case, and criticized the majority’s application of a ticking two-year- time-bomb lurking within Florida’s post-conviction relief statute. “[T]urning to the prisoner, ‘What do you demand? ’. . . . ‘[I]f innocent, I may be set at liberty.’” Since no DNA tests were available at the time of his 1984 trial, Dedge asks for DNA tests, now available, which could exonerate him.