Federal Judiciary

More on Barbara Lagoa

 This time, a deep dive, by the New York Times. It starts this way:

As a young associate in a prestigious Miami law firm, Barbara Lagoa took on an unusual pro bono case, one without a supervising partner and against a formidable adversary: the Clinton administration.

Ms. Lagoa represented a relative of a 5-year-old boy found off the Florida coast after his mother had drowned trying to cross over from Cuba. His name was Elián González.

Federal agents would eventually seize Elián and return him to his father in Cuba, setting off political shock waves that arguably cost former Vice President Al Gore the 2000 presidential election when he lost Florida.

?After six months, countless briefs, a few all-nighters, two oral arguments and one midnight raid by armed commandos, we learned what it was like to lose,? Eliot Pedrosa, another lawyer on the team, said at a ceremony last year when Judge Lagoa joined the Florida Supreme Court. The experience of ?watching armed federal agents use force to pre-empt process,? he said, was ?seared into her soul.?

That formative episode helped shape Judge Lagoa?s career as a federal prosecutor and appellate judge and thrust her into South Florida?s political culture, dominated by Cuban-American Republicans.

It is an electoral dynamic that remains powerful two decades later and has helped Judge Lagoa, who now sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, emerge as an attractive choice for President Trump as he considers whom he will name to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

Trump says he may be meeting with her this week in Miami.  The article ends this way:

For the people trying to promote her nomination in South Florida, though, Judge Lagoa?s life story as the daughter of immigrants matters just as much as her record.

Her friends mention her modest upbringing in the blue-collar city of Hialeah. She rode her bike and roller skated around the neighborhood. Her parents saved up to send her to Catholic school. It was a big deal when she went away to New York for law school.

?In the country my parents fled, the whim of a single individual could mean the difference between food or hunger, liberty or prison, life or death,? Judge Lagoa said last year, when she was nominated to the Florida Supreme Court. ?Unlike the country my parents fled, we are a nation of laws ? not of men.?

Full post as published by Southern District of Florida on September 22, 2020 (boomark / email).