Another view of the judicial system.

Once again Florida Bar members are subjected to glittering generalities about "Protecting Our Fair and Independent Judicial System" (March 2005). They are sent down to us from on high, that is, from The Florida Bar president. Here on earth, those lofty assurances as often as not may be greeted by knowing smiles and heads shaking from side to side, so let me tell you what the view is like from the bottom up.

I have been in the Florida legal system for 20 years, since I arrived in Orlando as executive director of Greater Orlando Area Legal Services (GOALS). I practiced for nearly as long in Michigan and New York, before I came here. By the time I was admitted to The Florida Bar and the U.S. Court for the Middle District of Florida, in 1987, I had blown the whistle on wrongdoing by GOALS staff and board attorney members. They had facilitated entry into Florida of North Carolina and Georgia banks with questionable histories of commercial and home lending to the poor and minority groups. See Kaimowitz v. The Bd. of Gov. of the Fed. Res., 940 F.2d 610 (11th Cir. 1991) (My administrative agency appeal was dismissed for lack of standing, because the panel found I suffered no injury to my reputation as I asserted, in light of the fact that the federal agency adopted many of the criticisms I made during the administrative process about events in Orange County, Florida.). But I didn't begin to learn about the "fair and independent judiciary" in Florida state courts until I began to practice in Gainesville, at the site of the flagship university's law school.

About that time, the Bar published the views of then Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerald Kogan, who was quoted as informing law students that both trial and appeals judges talk to one another about lawyers, just as attorneys gossip about them. See G. Blankenship, "Reputations Aren't Hypothetical," The Fla. Bar News, Aug. 1, 1996, p. 12. Justice Kogan explained that meant no case, no client was worth the loss of reputation by an attorney whose credibility would be forever damaged if judges came to believe that they had to look out the window to see for themselves when such a scoundrel said it was raining outside.

By then, I already had spent five years in federal court trying to separate myself from this Bar's "color blindness." I didn't have to ask about my reputation in this state. It was long gone. That litigation against The Florida Bar still is remembered by the Eighth Judicial Circuit Court bench, as I learned last year. That bench is as white as it was when I started in 1996. Those elected judges are helped out by more than a half-dozen senior judges, some of whom were never elected locally. Several entered the Bar when they had to swear to uphold a state constitution that required the racial segregation of the state's educational system. The judges and lawyers who frequently know one another through the University of Florida and its law school hobnob together at events held by their historically white private bar association. One small law firm predominates as a host. Several of its former members are judges today. At times, they even sing and dance together, or raise money for worthy causes. I and others like me, of course, can join in their gatherings (sic). One such group of 35 or so felt it necessary to start their own bar association, an African-American bar group. Ask black litigants and other minorities in my jurisdiction what they think of the need to protect "our fair and independent judicial system." Get out of the way before the laughter begins.

GABE KAIMOWITZ

Gainesville