Fifty Years of Justice: A History of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

• Author: Jarvis, Robert M.
• Position: Book review

Fifty Years of Justice: A History of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida

By James M. Denham

As federal courts go, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (MDF) is not very old, having been created in 1962. What it lacks in age, however, it more than makes up for in size, both in terms of population (11 million people) and area (27,750 square miles). Stretching from the state's extreme southwest to its far northeast (a distance of nearly 400 miles), the MDF has 15 judges, 13 senior judges, and 16 magistrate judges, and operates five courthouses (in Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Ocala, Orlando, and Tampa). Annually, it logs 10,000 new cases (8,600 civil and 1,400 criminal), making it one of the nation's 10 busiest federal trial courts.

Numbers, however, can only do so much. What is needed is a narrative that is at once both broad and detailed, giving a court a sense of time and place and locating it within the country's evolution. Recognizing this fact, a cottage industry has sprung up in recent years to produce books about individual federal district courts. The best-known is Robert Zirin's The Mother Court: Tales of Cases that Mattered in America's Greatest Trial Court (2014), which examines the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and its hotly-debated claim of being the country's oldest district court. (Although the Judiciary Act of 1789 simultaneously created district courts in each of the 13 original states, New York's was the first to sit, holding an abbreviated session on November 3, 1789.)

During its territorial period, Florida's superior courts exercised both federal and state jurisdiction. In 1845, Congress organized the new state of Florida into one federal judicial district with a single judge (Isaac Bronson). In 1847, Congress split the state into two districts, respectively designated as the Northern (NDF) and Southern (SDF) districts, with Bronson becoming the NDF's first judge and William Marvin being named to the SDF's seat.

Between 1922 and 1961...