Florida Law Review tutoring program helps 1L students
This week the Florida Law Review concluded its year-long tutoring program for first-year law students. The program began in 2002 as a way to give back to the law school and to assist 1Ls with their first-year courses. Florida Law Review members contribute more than 148 hours per semester toward tutoring sessions, and more than 370 first-year students enrolled for tutoring during the 2008-2009 school year. The tutoring program provides first-year students with the opportunity to ask questions in a less-formal environment, often from students who were taught by the same professors. First-year students rave about how much the extra tutoring helps them with their classes. “The Florida Law Review tutoring program is the pinnacle of peer tutoring,” said first-year student, Greg Kwok. “The guidance and instruction the tutors provided allowed for a more thorough examination and understanding of the course material, given that it comes from students and not professors. It is a tremendous opportunity for the 1L class to work with some of the Law Review students in a very informal and relaxed atmosphere.” “The Florida Law Review tutoring sessions are an invaluable resource for first year law students,” said first-year student, Margo Lyon. “After attending the Law Review tutoring sessions, I felt much more confident and at ease going into my exams.”

Moot Court brings home victories from ABA National Appellate Advocacy Competition
At the conclusion of the 2009 ABA National Appellate Advocacy Competition, University of Florida’s Justice Campbell Thornal Moot Court team members claimed many victories. At the Boston Regional, the petitioner team of Jennifer Jones, Michael Friedman and Andrew Hoffman, coached by Ryan Eastmoore, was ranked first coming out of the preliminary rounds and advanced to the final regional round. The petitioner team won the regional second best brief award, Michael Friedman won the third best regional advocate award, and Jennifer Jones won the eighth best regional advocate award. The respondent team of Dante Trevisani, Charlie Roberson and Rob Davis, coached by Amelia Williams, survived five rounds at the Boston Regional and advanced to the nationals in Chicago. The respondent team was ranked fifth coming out of the preliminary national rounds and placed in the top sixteen at the end of the competition. In addition, the respondent team took home the national third best brief award. The issues in this year’s competition included the separation of powers, standing, and the president’s war powers under the Commander in Chief Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Florida Law Review student notes & comments selected for publication
The Florida Law Review is pleased to announce the selection of 8 notes and 3 comments for publication in its 2009-10 issues. Vincent Galuzzo’s note on P2P litigation was the winner of the Best Note of 2009 award. Kristen Rasmussen’s comment on false light in Florida was selected as Best Comment of 2009. The notes and comments will be available in a print copy of Florida Law Review, as well as published on www.floridalawreview.com in the month they are printed. We encourage you to check our Web site frequently for current and new publications.
See the list of selected notes »

LIC extended exam hours
The Legal Information Center (LIC) will be open for extended hours during the final exam period. Beginning on Friday, April 24, through Thursday, May 7, the LIC will be open according to the following schedule:

Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. – 2 a.m.
Saturday from 9 a.m. – 2 a.m.
Sunday from 10 a.m. – 2 a.m.
Friday, May 8: 7:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.

During the intercession, from May 9, until May 19, the LIC will be open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. The LIC will be closed Saturdays and Sundays during the intercession. Regular summer hours begin starting May 20.

Fall 2010 Financial aid renewal reminder

For those of you who have not already done so, now is the time to apply for aid for the 2009-2010 academic year. I encourage you to apply by April 1 using FAFSA on the Web. Go to www.fafsa.ed.gov and follow the instructions on the site. After applying via FAFSA/Renewal FAFSA on the Web, you can check the status of your application and/or make corrections online. You will need to use your Federal Access Code (PIN) to complete the 2009/2010 FAFSA.

LIC Reminder: Designated quiet areas
The Legal Information Center (LIC) would like to remind students that certain areas of the library are designated “quiet” areas. These include the Supreme Court Reading Room, the second floor of the library, and the reading room on the west side of the building just past the elevator. Areas that are not designated “quiet” include: the reference area, the lobby, and the reserve area. Should you need to use your cell phone or engage in conversation, please do so only in the areas that are not designated “quiet.” Even in those instances, please be mindful of the other students and staff in the LIC. Noise carries in the lobby and stairwell, so please keep the volume of your conversation low.

On April 3, during the ball, the John Marshall Bar Association (JMBA) announced third-year law student Kassie Doyle and Professor Lee-ford Tritt as recipients of the 2009 Student and Professor of the Year, respectively. Each year JMBA selects recipients of both awards through a systematic process.

Doyle said she was completely shocked when her name was called during the ball.

“I honestly didn’t think that I would win. I was just thrilled to be a finalist,” said Doyle, who completed her undergrad at Duke University with a degree in Psychology. “It is a great honor. This school is full of tremendously intelligent people that are dedicated and hard working. To be picked out among all of these students, I am just really flattered.”

Doyle, who is the president of the Law College Council, is the kind of person that loves to get involved. She said though law school is challenging, it is important that students get involved and have fun. Otherwise, she said, students would be doing themselves a disservice.

After graduation, Doyle plans to move to Miami and work at McAlpin Conroy, a small maritime and admiralty firm. She said she instantly knew that the firm was the perfect place for her.

“Some of the interviews I went on felt like they would eat me and spit me out for lunch,” Doyle said. “I didn’t want to go to work scared every day. The environment [at McAlpin Conroy] was so great that when I walked in there I fell in love with it right away.”

Years from now, Doyle hopes to still be at McAplin Conroy. One thing that she doesn’t want to do though is make life all about money. “I don’t care to be the richest attorney around, or the busiest. What I really want is for my clients to be able to say that I helped them and made their lives a little better. I think that is something all attorneys should strive for.”

Professor of the Year, Lee-Ford Tritt, who joined the UF Law Faculty in 2005, said that the award meant a lot to him, especially after a difficult year.

“Florida students are phenomenal,” Tritt said. “They are very respectful, and they cheer you up without knowing it.”

So far, Tritt’s experience with the students has been amazing, he said. Just recently, Tritt suffered a loss, and his students were there to make him feel better.

“I have no idea how they found out or how they knew where I lived, but throughout the evening [after the tragedy] I kept on finding on my front door food and beer, which I thought was funny, he said. “I found it really touching.”

Tritt advices law school students to relax, and said they shouldn’t spend all of their time stressing about grades. Though grades are important, he said, they aren’t always the key to being successful.

“Sit back and try to look at the big picture,” he said. “Law is an amazing thing and in this profession the ‘scrappers’ standout. If you are just resilient and you roll up your sleeves and you work, you will be successful. You might not get that grade you wanted or that job you wanted at first, but the best lawyers in the nation are scrappers. They didn’t go to the best law school; they weren’t number one in their class. They make their name another way.”

Tritt said that his favorite thing about teaching is the interaction with his students and the environment at the University of Florida.

“I have lectured many places, but the Florida students are just a unique entity,” he said.

Tritt said teaching is one of the best decisions that he ever made and he wouldn’t trade it for the world.

“I don’t think that I could ever give up teaching,” said Tritt. “It is addictive and is just amazing. I don’t know what heroine is like, but I assume it’s similar.”

Despite Barry’s levity, completing tax returns is no joking matter, and the complexity of the tax code leaves most of us using that sharpened pencil to scratch our heads in confusion.

Not so for Justin Axelrod, a third-year law student at the University of Florida Levin College of Law with a love of all things taxation. At 25 years of age, Axelrod is the youngest member ever appointed to the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel by the U.S. secretary of treasury. He’s excited by the prospect of committing between 300 and 500 hours of time annually during his three-year appointment, which began in December.

“To be on a committee with these people from all sorts of backgrounds, it’s just humbling,” Axelrod said.

Established in 2002 under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel serves as a citizen forum that provides direct feedback to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS uses this feedback to increase its responsiveness to taxpayer needs, to work more effectively for all taxpayers, and to improve services. The Taxpayer Advocacy Panel has a real influence on the IRS’s strategic initiatives to improve its policies and programs.

Axelrod sits on the panel’s 13-member Area 3 Committee, which represents the states of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. He also serves on the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance issues committee, which partners with the IRS to focus on national initiatives or issues that cut across geographic boundaries. He said he isn’t sure why he was among the 100 people selected to serve nationwide, but believes his enthusiasm for tax and willingness to get his generation involved in tax administration were important factors in the decision.

One of the things Axelrod hopes to initiate during his service on the panel is free taxpayer clinics for families with low-income at the UF College of Law and Florida A&M University College of Law. He thinks it will serve a need in the community and also will give law school students in tax practical, hands-on skills. Currently, there are low-income tax clinics in Florida but none in the vicinity of these colleges.

Another goal of Axelrod’s is to reach a new generation of tax payers. To do this, he started a blog at www.justintimewithjustin.com and established a Taxpayer Advocacy Panel Facebook group. He said young people need to know that taxes affect everyone. He frequently updates his blog and Facebook page with information on tax-related issues and events and seeks to educate people on their rights and responsibilities as tax payers.

“Whether you like it or not, at sometime in your life you are going to have to deal with the IRS,” he said.

Axelrod said he wants people to know that the panel is there for them when they do, and he works hard to respond to each suggestion or comment posted to his blog or Facebook page.

“You’re going to get a voice,” Axelrod said. “It is important for people to be heard. I am your voice and so are the other members on the panel.”

Even Dave Barry might put his pencil away with a sigh of relief.

Recognizing that diversity extends beyond the black community, the event held at the Matheson Museum, was open to the entire UF Law community.

Dean Jerry welcomed the guests and congratulated BLSA on its leadership. He also noted that not only was progress evident at UF Law, but in the country as evidenced by the election of the first African-American president of the United States Barack Obama. The guest speaker Allison Thompson, the director at Three Rivers Legal Services, also spoke about history. She spoke about her place in history with regard to diversity as one of the first African-American female graduates of UF Law (there were two in the class of 1973).

In celebrating diversity, BLSA recognized 27 individuals, the largest class of black graduates in the history of UF Law: Andrea Adibe, Jayson Alfonso, Ranaldo Allen, Renee Allen, Adrienne Biddings, Sophia Blair, Jonathan Blocker, Agnes Byrd, Meta M. Cooper, Marsha Dixon, Kailey Evans, Anisha Henry, Somara Jacques, Daniel Jean-Baptiste, Shanta Matthews, Simone Nelson, Crystal Talley, Clement C.J. Rabess, Linje Rivers, Jennifer Salu, Sharon Salu, Stephanie Simmonds, Iyandra Smith, Marie Triche, Ryan Waters, Nickisha Webb, and Kimberley Wright.

Because of the historical significance of the celebration, several sponsors contributed to the success of the event. The Law College Council and Student Government contributed financially, Dean Inman and Michelle Ocepek donated portfolios for the graduates, Junior’s catered the food, and the UF Law Bookstore donated door prizes.

For more on the history of diversity at UF Law, please visit http://www.law.ufl.edu/about/diversitybooklet.shtml and click on the link “Knowledge of the Past” for a presentation created by BLSA Class of 2009 graduate Daniel Jean-Baptiste.

Effective Guardian Attorneys arguably possess a wider range of skills than I have ever witnessed in other legal settings. This is probably why, when I think about what to compare the role to, I think of the very non-legal job of a swim instructor. Both the swim instructor and the Guardian Attorney: (1) protect children (2) in a chaotic sensory environment (3) in the midst of the influence of a lot of outside sources, and (4) can never be thanked enough for the lifesaving work that they do.

Breaking that analogy down, first and foremost one of the most difficult parts of dependency cases is that protecting children means most, if not all, of the decisions one makes about how to proceed with a case are going to affect someone in a serious way. A decision is never made without at least a dozen people questioning it via email, staging phone call bombardments, delivering monologues in court, or finding other ways to slow down the pace of what you are trying to do. Just as a swim instructor is peppered with a chorus of “I already know how to do that” from her swimmers or methodology questions from parents when she forces her swim class to practice the survival float repeatedly, Guardian Attorneys constantly fight to focus what can seem like 50 different parties on the fact that no matter how anyone feels about a particular issue, the children need to be protected at all costs.

To stretch the analogy further, a Guardian Attorney and a swim instructor both operate in a very chaotic environment. Routine court appearances such as judicial reviews or status conferences are scheduled for 10-15 minutes and everything that needs to be said needs to be concise. Court often runs behind schedule and it is not uncommon to have dozens of one’s cases on the docket on the same day. Not to mention, during the actual hearing the courtroom is anything but calm- Guardian Attorneys often need to speak above the rustle of people rushing in and out of the courtroom, files being lifted and dropped into various boxes, the occasional crying baby, and from time to time various parties who are commenting under their breath. From a distance a day in a dependency courtroom probably looks like an ant farm- always moving, changing, and rearranging itself. A pool deck can offer the same challenges to an instructor- classes can run back-to- back leaving little time for one to mentally transition, wet kids are sprinting across the deck and narrowly missing collisions with sunbathers, and aqua aerobics music nearly drowns out communication with concerned parents. In the midst of these environments both the Guardian Attorney and the swim instructor are expected to deliver pitch-perfect performances resonating with clarity and charisma.

Outside sources and opinions are yet another thing with which the swim instructor and the Guardian Attorney need to cope. When teaching swimming it’s almost like the words “please advise” are printed on an instructor’s head. Every parent, lap swimmer, sunbather, and lifeguard will tell an instructor, and tell him or her often, what he or she needs to do to improve a swimmer’s skill level. Everyone has an opinion and everyone is firmly convinced that his or her opinion is the correct opinion. The same situation confronts the Guardian Attorney. There can be literally dozens of people involved in a dependency case, and no one hesitates to inform the Guardian Attorneys of the best course of action. It is not uncommon for that course of action to be legally impossible or utterly unreasonable and the Guardian Attorney has to graciously respond to literally countless perspectives on the “correct legal course of action.”

The Guardian Attorneys I have worked with during the course of my Fellowship have displayed the most patience and poise I have ever seen in the courtroom. The challenges they face in dependency court are unique and challenging, and I would like to think that the end results of their work, like that of a swim instructor, are life-saving. That said, they can never be thanked enough for the work that they do. It is challenging, but I have come to understand that the end reward- knowing you have helped change a child’s life- is worth all the struggles experienced along the way.

Courtney R. Gutenschwager worked this past year for the Guardian Ad Litem Program as part of her Public Interest Law Fellowship, which is funded by the Florida Bar Foundation and sponsored by the Center for Governmental Responsibility and the Center for Career Services.

Despite the adoption of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights sixty years ago, farmworkers in the United States must still fight for the rights to a just wage, to work free of forced labor, and to organize.

Agricultural labor has been described as one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and farmworkers suffer more pesticide poisonings than any other sector of American labor. Federal law excludes farmworkers from many of the protections provided to other laborers, and farmworkers in Florida face deplorable conditions.

In November 2008, University of Florida law students gathered to learn more about the issues faced by farmworkers in Florida. The Public Service Law Fellows (Fellows), funded by The Florida Bar Foundation, organized the event with the co-sponsorship of APIL, CaribLaw, HLLSA, and SALSA. The event featured a discussion with Bert Perry, the Florida Director of the National Farm Worker Ministry, and Jose Antonio Tovar, a University of Florida graduate student who works with the Farmworker Association. Perry and Tovar described the legal, economic, and social conditions for agricultural workers in Florida including environmental hazards, living conditions, and hours and intensity of the work.

In 1960 the television documentary Harvest of Shame exposed many Americans to the harsh realities of agricultural labor in the United States. On the afternoon before the panel discussion, the Fellows screened the documentary in the courtyard of the law school, but the demographics of Florida agricultural labor have changed since 1960. Today farmworkers in Florida are increasingly immigrants, and their immigration status affects the conditions under which they must labor. The panelists spoke about the interplay between immigration status and labor conditions, domestic violence, and sexual harassment.

Organizing events like the panel discussion on farmworkers in Florida is one of the tasks of the Fellows. In the spring 2009 semester, the Fellows organized a continuing legal education seminar on defending residential foreclosures for attorneys and students. Organizing these events allows the Fellows to support the discussion of public interest work at the law school and to encourage other law students to become passionate and committed to using their education to advance public interests. Additionally, the Fellows work throughout their two semester term at local not-for-profit or governmental legal organizations. These placements allow Fellows to put the skills developed in the classroom into practical application while serving clients with limited access to legal resources.

During this past year Caroline McCrae worked for Three Rivers Legal Services and the Office of the Public Defender as part of her Public Service Law Fellowship, which is funded by The Florida Bar Foundation and supervised by the Center for Governmental Responsibility and the Center for Career Services.

The ceremony recognized the law school students who have excelled in serving their community. The students who were honored dedicated at least 35 hours in their respective programs.

“We are here today celebrating you,” said Kristen Bryant, assistant director for Career Services and pro bono and community service project coordinator, as she opened the ceremony. “You all have achieved amazing things throughout the course of your law school career, along with the number of hours that you have been able to accumulate.”

Bryant gave the floor to Dean Robert Jerry who congratulated the students on their accomplishments and for the service they provided.

“One of the things, which we want to project about our law school, is that you come to the University of Florida not only to prepare yourself to be a confident and skilled first-rate professional lawyer, but also to be a great citizen and a leader,” he said. “What you are doing, I think, is one of the best examples of the values that we hope all Florida graduates take away from here and make an important part of their careers.”

To give the attendees some prospective on what contributing students have accomplished, in terms of volunteer hours, Bryant shared the amount of hours each graduating class has accumulated. The graduating class of 2011 completed 224 community hours and 706 pro bono hours for a total of 930 volunteer hours. The class of 2010, completed over 1,000 community service hours 5,433 pro bono hours for a total of nearly 6,500 volunteer hours. The class of 2009, completed over 1,000 community service over 8,000 pro bono hours total, for a total volunteer hours of 9,087.

Kathanna Culp was named the Student of the Year for completing the most volunteer hours, over 250.

Culp, the former president of the Association for Public Interest Law, earned the majority of her pro bono hours at ACLU in Atlanta, but also worked at the Center for Children & Families, Three Rivers Legal Services.

Other students honored at the brunch include, Renee Allen, William Bagwell, Heather Bernstein, Lisa Boyd, Alyssa Camper, Patricia Carbone, Tariq Chaudhri, Tabitha Chookolingo, Christine Covington, Timothy Corwin, Sara Dahod, Paul Darby, Megan Davis, Dina El-Salhy, Tobi Epstein, Jennifer Frazier, Cristina Fernandez, Mitchell Goldberg, Amanda Harrell, Han Huang, Jonathan Huth, Alexander Karden , Marcela Lozano, Susan Malove, Elizabeth Manno, Joshua Marks, Angela Marino, Keri McGovern, Hector Melendez Jr., Maxwell Minch, Nicole Mouakar, Martina Nethery, Natalie A. Peters, David Plotke, Troy Pratten, Jee Min Rhee, Belinda Rivera, Michael Roark, Clint Roberson, Kristianna Rodriquez, Lindsay Ruiz Bash, Sahily Serradet, Dena Setzer, Jessica Shapiro, Erin Simendinger ,William Spicola, Brandon Stelck, Scott Stengel, Alejandra Taboada, Stephanie Toledo, Matthew Edward Tiffany, Le Tsang, Debra Valsamis, Michael Vater, Christian Vogel, Jana Wasserman, Patrick Wheeler, Jeffrey Wilson, Cynthia Winter, Kimberley Wright and Mary Zewalk.

Many reports have indicated that by year 2025, two thirds of the world’s population (which will be approximately six billion people) will lack potable water. The United Nations has reported on the world’s water crisis and say approximately one in five people in the developing world currently lack access to clean water.

Now you may ask, how does this affect me? If you are not one of the millions of people directly affected, then you are at least indirectly affected in one of a million ways. Because of water shortages and the redistribution of water, people are suffering. This suffering leads to desperation which in turn results in conflict. Indeed, conflicts are already occurring worldwide because of water scarcity.

These conflicts affect our national security, as well as our access to products, services, and natural resources. Although this is a huge problem in need of governmental action, you as an individual can contribute to reducing your water-footprint.

How? Reduce your use of plastics to start. Plastic products use an incredible amount of water to produce and transport. As a matter of fact, it takes approximately six times the amount of water in a bottle of water to create the bottle itself. While on the topic of bottled water, in the United States where drinkable fresh water is free and highly accessible, why not re-fill re-usable bottles with free tap water?

For those of you who would not dare drink tap water in the U.S., statistics and facts show that tap water is just as safe to drink as bottled water, and bottled water might well be nothing more than repackaged tap water. Although bottled water companies are spending millions to convince you that bottled water is better than tap water, the fact is that the bottled water industry is much less regulated overall when compared to the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of public tap water.

Not only does it take a disproportionate amount of water to produce and transport basic plastic products, but when plastic is disposed of in a landfill it takes approximately 1000 years to disintegrate and that disintegrating plastic goes into the Earth contaminating more underground water from which we derive our fresh water supply! Therefore the general individual use of plastic and its placement in the trash, verses in the recycling bin, contributes to billions of people being in water jeopardy.

In conclusion, you are affected by the world’s water crisis in one way or another. Each little individual action or inaction causes a ripple effect in the world which will ultimately influence other people as well as you. Therefore, get involved and at the very least…reduce, reuse, and recycle!

Kristianna Rodriguez, worked this past year in the Office of the Public Defender as part of her Public Interest Law Fellowship, funded by The Florida Bar Foundation, and supported by the Center for Governmental Responsibility and the Center for Career Services.

The system is designed to provide a fair and unbiased forum for the administration of justice. In practice, however, many individuals, particularly those with lower-incomes, feel slighted, wounded, and betrayed by the very structure that vows to serve and protect them.

Restoring the faith in the system, then, is a major component of public interest law. The legal system is not a mortal enemy. Instead, it is a life-long friend and a forum for the aggrieved, regardless of economic status. I am drawn to public interest law because I believe in this forum and I want to ensure that everyone has access to it.

Whether they need help saving their home from a pending foreclosure action or are desperate to receive the public benefits to which they are entitled, everyone deserves their day in court and a lawyer by their side whose primary goal is to advocate zealously for her client. I want to be that advocate.

Thus, my Public Service Fellowship, funded by the Florida Bar Foundation, has been incredibly instrumental in my quest to become that advocate. Through the fellowship, I have had the opportunity to do research on complex and intriguing issues like foreclosure actions, international custody issues, and retirement account distributions and have seen firsthand what a difference an attorney can make in the lives of our city’s less fortunate.

In my work as a Public Service Fellow, I saw similar types of victims. I saw victims of chance, victims of circumstance, victims of poor choices, and victims of wearying generational cycles. Each case presented a new scenario that required a unique strategy and a dedicated plan of operation.

From them, I learned not only of the great desire for the legal protection of our community’s citizens, but of the ever important necessity. Without this protection, too many men, women, and children fall through the cracks of our nation, lost, forgotten, and without the chance for meaningful survival. Legal Services is, for many, a lifeline.

For others, it is a fresh start. Of course, there are the clients who lie, who demand services without working for them, and who seek only to abuse the system. But, for that forty-five year old mother, recently widowed, who needs disability compensation to provide for her young family, or for the eighty-two year old woman dying of cancer whose only concern is to ensure that her three adopted daughters of six, seven, and eight are taken care of after she is gone, or the father whose family was evicted in retaliation for his attempt to provide a clean, safe, and habitable home for his wife and two boys, Legal Service attorneys provide hope.

Recently, I had a prominent Gainesville attorney tell me that he envied public interest lawyers because they got to practice law in its purest form. At the time, I didn’t really know what he meant. However, there is something to be said for advocating, not just for an individual’s property or personal interests, but also for that person’s livelihood.

Public interest law truly gives a new meaning to the phrase “life, liberty, and property” and I am grateful for the opportunity to have participated in the practice.

Crystal Talley worked this past year for Three Rivers Legal Services as part of her Florida Bar Foundation Public Interest Law Fellowship, sponsored by the Center for Governmental Responsibility and the Center for Career Services.

One population that is often ignored by the legal community—even the public interest law community—is people in prison. As Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked in his 2003 speech at the ABA’s Annual Meeting: “When someone has been judged guilty and the appellate and collateral review process has ended, the legal profession seems to lose all interest. . . When the door is locked against the prisoner, we do not think about what is behind it.”

The reason for this is that most people view prisons as dark worlds that are far away from their own and to which they have no connection, and therefore deserve none of their attention. Many people are unaware of the systematic abuses that occur in prisons: the beatings by guards, the rapes which go unpunished, the sexual harassment of female inmates, the humiliating strip searches, the substandard medical treatment or lack thereof, the lack of concern for mental health, and the mental torture of solitary confinement.

Moreover, many people are unaware of the legal obstacles that prisoners face to even get into court. For example, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), a federal law passed to reduce the number of prisoner lawsuits, imposes substantial restrictions on prisoners’ access to courts. Before filing a federal lawsuit, a prisoner must properly exhaust all administrative remedies that the prison offers, which means that if a prisoner misses a deadline for filing a grievance, he or she could be forever barred from filing a lawsuit.

The PLRA prohibits any prisoner who previously filed three “frivolous” lawsuits from ever filing a prisoner lawsuit again, it prohibits any prisoner from suing unless the prisoner has suffered physical injury, and it caps attorney’s fees for all prisoner lawsuits. Thus, prisoners need diligent and talented lawyers willing to enforce their constitutional rights to humane living conditions.

Fortunately, such lawyers do exist. Right here in Gainesville, for example, the dedicated attorneys of Florida Institutional Legal Services, which is funded in part by the Florida Bar Foundation, strive to enforce prisoners’ constitutional rights to humane conditions and to be free from abuse. They have recently litigated cases involving the treatment of inmates in long-term solitary confinement and the gassing of mentally ill inmates while in their cells.

Unfortunately, some people are of the attitude that all prison inmates somehow “deserve” the abuses and inhumane conditions in prison. That view simply ignores the fact that prisoners, whose every move and privilege are controlled by the state, deserve humane treatment. Their punishment is their lack of liberty, and nothing more.

Moreover, when prisoners are treated inhumanely, they lose any incentive to conform their behavior to society’s expectations, and are much more likely to recidivate when released. Indeed, 88% of the roughly 90,000 Florida prisoners will be released one day, and over a quarter of them will return within 3 years. To protect society, inmates should be released from prison feeling as though they can advance in the world.

Thus, this very important topic deserves the time and effort of Florida attorneys. We as citizens should concern ourselves with the operation of American’s prisons, rather than turn our backs on them. As Justice Kennedy put it: “Out of sight, out of mind is an unacceptable excuse for a prison system that incarcerates over two million human beings in the United States.”

Dante Trevisani worked this past year for Florida Institutional Legal Services as part of his Public Interest Law Fellowship, funded by The Florida Bar Foundation.