(C) Florida Phoenix This story was originally published by Florida Phoenix and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Ceremony marks Renatha Francis’ ascension to the Florida Supreme Court [1] ['Michael Moline', 'More From Author', '- October'] Date: 2023-10-18 Two years and five months after Gov. Ron DeSantis first attempted to appoint Renatha Francis to the Florida Supreme Court, and just more than a year after he finally got her there, the court held a ceremonial investiture for Francis on Wednesday. Her fellow justices attended the robing ceremony, as did DeSantis himself, Florida House Speaker Paul Renner and Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, and a whole bunch of sitting and former state judges and prominent attorneys. “Before you I sit as the 92nd justice on our Florida Supreme Court, the first Caribbean-American, the second Black female, and only the sixth woman on our court since its formation in 1845 when Florida became a state,” Francis said. “It’s not lost on me, the significance of these trailblazing roles or the words of the oath that I just took. Having been raised outside the United States, I know what a treasure we have in our republican form of government — little ‘r,’ she added. “It is worth defending, it is worth protecting, and our role as a court in this process is to make sure that we uphold the structural constraints of government action to protect liberty — confining what we do to apply what the words meant at the time when the law was passed. We don’t get to put our gloss on it, encroaching where we have no authority to do so, violating separation of powers in the process. No,” she said. Of course, Francis took her seat on Sept. 1 last year, although without the ceremony of Wednesday’s event. DeSantis had attempted to place Francis on the court in May 2020, but the justices refused to seat her because she hadn’t been a member of the Florida Bar for the constitutionally required 10 years. Given a second chance, he picked her again for a vacancy on Aug. 5, 2022. Unconventional career DeSantis himself, before handling over Francis’ ceremonial judicial commission to the court and then ducking out of the courtroom where a packed crowd had gathered, remarked on Francis’ unconventional rise as the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica, an immigrant herself, and the graduate of the unranked, for-profit Florida Coastal School of Law, which went out of business in 2021. She went on to earn appointments to trial courts in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties before attracting DeSantis’ eye. “I’m proud that we are honoring today a justice who arrived to this court taking the road less traveled,” the governor said. “I don’t know how many other Supreme Court justices in all 50 states would have a similar story. And certainly, when she was starting out in Jamaica, born and bred, when she was managing small businesses there, taking care of her younger sibling, you probably wouldn’t have a lot of takers to say this would be someone who’d be on the Florida Supreme Court one day,” he added. One factor in Francis’ rise was her affiliation with the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a sort of farm team for the conservative legal movement. DeSantis has stacked the state’s judicial nominating commissions with Federalist members who tend to select other members for seats on the bench. During the ceremony, Francis won praise from legal practitioners including members of bar associations representing women, Caribbean Americans, and Blacks in the law. Also in attendance were Francis’ mother, Hyacinth Francis, sons Josh, 6, and Matt, 3, and other family members. Absent was her husband, Phillip Fender, a marketing and communications executive who died on Nov. 2, 2022, shortly after his wife joined the court, according to a report in the Jamaica Observer. “He thought big, especially when I had doubts, and to him I could do anything, and that’s what he made me feel. Of course, he would have wanted to be here today. He wanted this for me, and I’m eternally grateful that, although for only two months, he got to see it realized,” Francis said. [END] --- [1] Url: https://floridaphoenix.com/2023/10/18/ceremony-marks-renatha-francis-ascension-to-the-florida-supreme-court/ Published and (C) by Florida Phoenix Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/floridaphoenix/