Now, Therefore, Be It Resolved by the Board of Trustees of Stetson University and the Board of Overseers of Stetson University
College of Law that this resolution be adopted to honor W. Gary Vause for his selfless devotion to the affairs of Stetson University
and the College of Law, his attainment of the highest standards of excellence in the legal profession and within the field of higher education, and to express our appreciation for having been privileged to work with this outstanding individual and his wife.
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There was something very special about Judge Jerry R. Parker’s laugh. At his memorial service, every person who spoke mentioned Jerry’s kindness and the gentle laugh that would emerge from this stern figure of a man. The memorial service concluded with Jerry’s own personal message, and in the opening sentences above, you could hear his gentle laugh and see his little smile and tilt of his head. His message, by the way, needed no rewriting or reorganization.
Judge Parker was my friend and colleague for more than a dozen years. I read with interest and respect each of the 723 appellate opinions that he authored during his career. I admired his work ethic and his determination to give all the people his full measure as a public servant. I watched him fight an evil disease with the same dogged determination with which he faced every challenge in life. I marveled at his inner strength, and I miss him very much.
Certiorari is one of the most commonly used writs in Florida’s District Courts of Appeal. However, the scope of certiorari jurisdiction is often misunderstood, and many certiorari petitions are dismissed because the parties have sought review of an issue that is simply beyond the scope of proper certiorari review. This Article addresses the uses of certiorari review in the district courts of appeal and the standard of review applicable to the various types of certiorari. This Article then provides suggestions for writing and filing a winning petition.
It is difficult to ask a party filing an initial civil lawsuit also to choose an appellate court. Trial attorneys are arguably more concerned with jury pools than with the philosophy and differences between various appellate courts. Yet, overlooking this point can be costly. Florida offers different appellate remedies from its federal counterpart, and at distinctly different times.
For instance, the Florida Rules of Appellate Procedure permit immediate appeals of class certification orders. The federal rules do not—appeals are at the federal court’s discretion. As counsel for a newly served class-action defendant, your knee-jerk reaction might be to remove this class-action lawsuit from state court to federal court. Is this wise, however, when your priority is to ensure that this lawsuit does not proceed as a class action? By remaining in state court, you have the immediate right to appeal the class certification order. Unfortunately, this right is not available in federal court. At bottom, then, a party’s failure to consider appellate remedies from a lawsuit’s inception could deprive that party of valuable appellate options. Even worse, ignoring this issue might provide your opponent with appellate rights that otherwise would not have been available.
It has become increasingly rare for an appellate court to grant oral argument for an appeal. In fact, in a small number of jurisdictions, courts will hear an oral argument only when a party requests it or the court actually orders it. Although numerous reasons exist for this diminution in the quantity of oral arguments, the most telling is the crushing workload appellate courts face today.
Not only has oral argument become less common, but the time allotted for oral argument has decreased. In the early 1800s, Daniel Webster argued for the appellant in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. The oral argument in that case lasted three days. Today, appellants and appellees are often limited to fifteen minutes or less of oral argument.
Thus, the cases that make it to oral argument typically are the ones that raise “important” or complex issues or include facts that are so complex that the judges or justices on the appellate panel reviewing the briefs encounter enough difficulty that they require clarification. This is indeed a select few of the enormous number of cases that the appellate court reviews, and the appellate party who receives oral argument should treat the situation with the importance that the appellate court accorded it. This Article will explore the importance of oral argument, and will offer suggestions on how to prepare for this critical event in the life of a case.
Florida’s District Courts of Appeal (DCAs) function as the courts of last resort for most litigants in the state court system. Most appeals to the DCAs are filed in appeal of “final judgments” of the circuit courts. This Article examines the difficulties that have arisen over the years as the DCAs attempt to determine what is, and what is not, a “final judgment” that is appealable on that basis. The analysis is limited to appeals from civil and administrative, rather than criminal, orders. Part Two of this Article contains a brief overview of the history of Florida’s appellate court structure. Part Three provides an overview of the DCAs’ jurisdiction; Part Four examines in detail the Florida courts’ efforts to clarify the standard against which an order’s “finality” is measured. Part Five analyzes the procedure by which final (actual or putative) orders are appealed, and Part Six concludes with a summary of how well the system is currently working.
In our article on amicus briefs in the first volume of the Appellate Advocacy Symposium, we discussed the importance of amicus briefs and what makes them useful to courts. We explained that, although some amicus briefs are merely “me too” briefs and, as such, add little insight, others can “be very valuable in highlighting for the Court that people or organizations in the State other than the litigants themselves view the case as one requiring a decision . . . .”
However, it is rightly said that an ounce of practice is worth a pound of precept. With that in mind, we offer this short reflection on an actual amicus brief filed published in the United States Supreme Court cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger after our article was published. We believe the amicus brief provided by high-ranking individuals of the military well exemplifies what an amicus brief can and should be.
During the summer of 1957, after completing my first semester of law school, I worked in Panama City, Florida, on a Dr. Pepper truck, selling soft drinks. The driver of the truck and I stopped at every grocery store, gas station, motel, hotel, restaurant, bar, and “juke joint” in that area, including a place called the Bay Harbor Poolroom. The poolroom was named for the small community in which it was located, just a few miles east of the center of Panama City.
The Panama City area was dominated by a huge paper mill located at Bay Harbor. The paper manufacturing process caused a smell that was pervasive for miles in every direction; no one in Panama City or in its environs could escape the caustic odor that stung and burned the eyes, the throat, and the face. Anthony Lewis, in Gideon’s Trumpet, described the paper mill and the adjacent area in the following words:
Just outside the city limits, twenty minutes from the motels and restaurants and Post Office that make “downtown,” is a gigantic International Paper Company plant, its tall chimneys spewing out sulphurous smoke. Huddled near the plant fence, within sight and smell of the chemical fumes, is the community of Bay Harbor. Community is too grandiose a word for it; Bay Harbor is a bitter, decayed parody of a movie set for a frontier town. It is just a few dilapidated buildings separated by dirt roads and alleys and weed-filled empty lots: a bar, a two-story “hotel,” a grocery and the Bay Harbor Poolroom. One who happened onto that dark street would be eager to drive back through the dank countryside to the highway and its neon. Gideon had no illusions about Bay Harbor; he called it “Tobacco Road.”
Legal dialogue among scholars in the fields of constitutional law and the commons law of privacy about the emerging applications of video security technology has been ongoing for more than a decade. Early articles on the constitutionality of using closed circuit television (CCTV) technology for “citizen safety” purposes documented the first series of projects and raised fundamental constitutional issues that have been the subject of real outcomes described in the most recent legal commentary. In ten short years, the legal literature has drawn some fairly solid conclusions based upon both theory and experience. Recently, constitutional concerns for privacy have also been raised in the context of the emerging use of such technology by employers to monitor employees’ suspected incriminating conduct that threatens the employer’s
economic interests.