Florida judge Jared Smith’s career is on the fast track and all it took was an awful decision on abortion that voters (rightly) rebuked him over and a governor itching to remake the Sunshine State into a conservative hellscape.
Smith first had his moment in the abortion wars limelight last year when he denied a 17-year-old girl seeking a judicial bypass to parental permission access to abortion care because he said her GPA suggested she was too immature to make the decision on her own. (But apparently that immaturity doesn’t prevent her from becoming a parent, because logic is overrated!)
Fortunately, an appellate court overruled Judge Smith in that case.
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Since that brush with notoriety, Smith was voted out of office. And while this questionable decision likely played a role in his ouster, there was also the matter of an antisemitism controversy during his reelection campaign.
But that wasn’t the end of Smith’s judicial career — he then got a promotion when Ron DeSantis appointed Smith to the state’s 6th District Court of Appeals.
Now more career advancement may be in the cards. As reported by the Guardian, Smith is one of 14 candidates on the shortlist for the Florida supreme court. Last month, justice Ricky Polston announced he was stepping down from the bench, giving DeSantis the opportunity to pick his 5th (out of 7, total) supreme court member.
And yeah, he’s taking full advantage of the moment:
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DeSantis began his transformation of the Florida supreme court immediately after taking office in 2019, appointing three justices in his first month. John Stemberger, president of the Florida family policy council, said at the time the court had “the potential to have the most reliably consistent and conservative judicial philosophy in the country”.
DeSantis’s fourth pick, in August last year, was Renatha Francis, a Jamaica-born immigrant whose first judicial appointment was under DeSantis’s predecessor, Rick Scott, now a Republican US senator.
DeSantis tried and failed to elevate her to the supreme court two years earlier, with justices ruling he exceeded his authority by naming a judge lacking the 10 years’ membership of the Florida Bar required by the state constitution.
So a reliably conservative jurist who just happens to be out of step with Floridians is exactly the kind of person DeSantis wants on that court.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].