Florida's Trial Judges Should be Appointed, Not Elected

There are good state trial judges in Florida, and there are bad ones. However, all of them are elected -- not appointed as state appellate judges and all federal judges -- are. I have been a trial and appellate lawyer in Monroe County (the Florida Keys) since 1983. Over those 28 years, I have appeared before good, and not-so-good, judges. I have also appeared before state appellate judges, and it is my firm conviction that electing trial judges is a bad idea. 

Being an attorney is a second career for me -- and there are days when I wish I had never switched. From 1963 to 1970, I earned BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan. From 1966 through 1984, I published 50 peer-reviewed papers and reports. I published my first book in 1971, on the surface chemistry of activated carbon, and edited nine books on chemistry instrumentation from 1972 to 1981. In 1979, I graduated from George Washington University law school, in the top 5% of my class.

Monroe County has four Circuit judges and four County judges. Over the years, some Circuit judges have developed specialties such as criminal or probate matters. That works in Key West, where there are three Circuit Judges. Occasionally, the voters have elected judges who don't have the patience a judge needs, or do not take the time to learn a field of law that is in front of them. One of the best we ever had was Steve Shea, who did his own research and spent nights writing well reasoned decisions. However, Judge Shea irritated his colleagues to the point where they ran him off the bench. (Steve Shea passed away last year, from kidney cancer.)

I do not believe that Monroe County's trial judges are any different from those in the rest of Florida -- and they may well be better. What I do believe is that the parties, and counsel, who appear before Florida's trial judges are entitled to a higher level of quality than the haphazard situation we have now. Florida's appellate judges are appointed by the Governor. As far as I can tell from 24 years of appellate practice, our appointed judges are well-vetted by their peers. I realize this is an issue in many States, not just in Florida, but there is just no way to "vet" every lawyer who puts up signs before election day. 

Voice of Reason Recipients Getting the Message

Five weeks after mailing the latest Voice of Reason to every owner of Tier I land in unincorporated Monroe County, responses from all over the country have been strong. One-third of the affected landowners reside outside Florida; another third live in Florida but outside Monroe County; the other third reside in Monroe County.

We have been getting e-mails and telephone calls every day from landowners who have resisted the State's siren invitations to buy their land for pennies on the dollar. Almost without exception, these landowners have no clue what their property would be worth in a proper eminent domain proceeding. But ... these are individuals who have rejected State offers for years, and are willing to fight. The faint-hearted sold out long ago.

We continue to tell Keys landowners that they are opposing one of the United States' most intransigent enemies of landowners -- local governments that are captives of the homevoters that elect them.

If you have not received a Voice of Reason in the past six weeks, it is likely that the Monroe County Property Appraiser does not have your current address on file. You can resolve this by calling or writing the Property Appraiser to correct your mailing address. You will then receive the next Voice of Reason in the mail. That is because we use the Property Appraiser's database to build our mailing list. (To download the March 2009 issue, click on the title of this post.)

Voice of Reason Sent to Every Owner of Undeveloped Tier I Property in Unincorporated Monroe County

Over the next few days, copies of our latest issue of The Voice of Reason should appear in the mailboxes of every owner of undeveloped, Tier I, property in unincorporated Monroe County. Even though we put this issue together a couple of months ago, we had to get it cleared by the Florida Bar as "advertising." The Bar's reviewer took issue with our use of words like "stealing" and "thieves," when referring to the governments of Florida and Monroe County. She suggested we were accusing government of criminal activities for which they should be tried and incarcerated. It hadn't crossed my mind yet, but sounds like a good idea to me!

So we toned down the rhetoric a notch, updated the story on page 4, and uploaded it to be printed and mailed -- by first-class mail. We are working on a modified version to be mailed to the owners of all undeveloped property in Islamorada and Marathon. Fortunately, now that we have been cleared by the Florida Bar with the current issue of The Voice of Reason, we don't have to submit future issues to the Bar for vetting.

The Role of the Unions in the Latest Economic Disaster

There is a link to "The Becker-Posner Blog" on my list of favorite blogs. Gary Becker won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics, and Richard Posner has been a judge on the United States 7th Circuit Court of Appeal since 1981. The two co-write a blog that addresses the US economy from their legal and economic points of view.

Their latest blog entry (click on the title of this post) addresses the problems facing GM, Chrysler, and Ford, in their attempts to remain viable companies while being saddled with the problems created by the United Auto Workers. As one who left Michigan in 1969, at age 24, I relate to the permeating effects of the UAW on the Big Three automakers in Michigan's economy.

As Judge Posner observes, the collaborative efforts of the Big Three and the UAW over several decades have placed the car companies in an untenable position vis-a-vis the union. For 30 years, the offshore car companies have built plants in the American South, with the cooperation of those State's legislatures, from which they have been eating the Big Three's lunch. Unless something dramatic happens -- and soon -- we will be witnessing the failure of all three domestic car companies (and the $15-$20 billion the Feds are giving to them). The Big Three have to ring the bankruptcy bell and shed their UAW blanket -- rather than allow Asia to take over America's auto sales. Just as the airlines did after 9/11, the car companies need to reorganize and shed their UAW contracts.

Note added January 4, 2009. There is an opinion piece, on pp. 9-10 of the Week in Review section, in today's New York Times titled "The End of the Financial World as we Know it." It does a nice job of deconstructing the ongoing bailout of investment banks that are "too big to fail," arguing that the Feds are just pouring that money down the drain. It's well worth reading, and the New York Times website allows you to read it for free.

The Latest Voice of Reason is Online

You can download the latest issue of our newsletter, The Voice of Reason, today. We mailed thousands of newsletters in the 90's when we were challenging the 1996 Florida Keys Comprehensive Plan. We didn't like it then and we don't like it today, so we decided to resume publishing a newsletter.

There was a reason the drafters of the United States Constitution wanted a bill of individual rights in 1789. The first 10 Amendments -- the Bill of Rights -- were intended to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Majority rule was presumed to lead to problems, and Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote extensively on the issue. Read The Federalist Papers, particularly Federalist 9 (Hamilton) and 10 (Madison), on "faction."

In the current issue of The Voice of Reason, we offer to create a web-based database that will reveal the governments' below fair-market-value offers for unbuildable property. Currently those offers are government "secrets," and nobody can obtain copies of these offers with public document requests. But nothing stops landowners from making their offers public.

Now we need to develop a strategy retroactively obtain supplemental compensation for former landowners who were paid only a fraction of what their property was worth. This may perturb homevoters and planners, but there is nothing in the Constitution that protects the government from such claims.