Category Archives: Miami

FIU Makes a High-Stakes Bet on Alex Acosta

Posted on May 28, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Controversial Alexander Acosta has been named Dean at neighboring FIU Law. See the AP story and the FIU statement. He'll be stepping down as US Attorney in a few days, and starts soon after.

FIU President Modesto A. Maidique said, “His connections at the national and local level and his proven leadership here at home will inspire the next generation of law students at FIU.''

I've never met Mr. Acosta, but I hear from those who have that he's a genuinely impressive human; smart, confident, very articulate. These are good qualities for a Dean. He'll need all those qualities, because jumping into academe is much harder than it looks. There have been some fine practitioner law Deans, but they are in the minority (cf. Why A Practitioner Dean Sounds Like A Better Idea Than It Usually Is). One thing to look forward to: a visit by Justice Alito, for whom Mr. Acosta clerked while he was on the Court of Appeals.

In addition to his extensive local ties, Mr. Acosta also has a sterling c.v., including praisworthy work on language-access issues, but there are also some question marks. Before becoming the local US Attorney, Mr. Acosta served in a leadership role in the Bush Justice Department as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. That means he was responsible for among other things:

By some accounts Mr. Acosta did much better at the US Attorney's office than I would have predicted from his resume, or from his initial statement that his chief law enforcement priority would be porn rather than terrorism, narcotics trafficking or, say, public corruption. But there are also reasons to doubt whether things were as great as some local lawyers have liked to suggest: his office tried the Liberty City Six (Seven, Five, whatever) three times, at the cost of millions that surely could have been better spent. It was on Mr. Acosta's watch that prosecutors in the US Attorney's office made recordings of defense lawyer (and blogger) David O. Markus in violation of internal policies of the U.S. Attorney's Office and federal evidentiary rules. This lead U.S. District Judge Alan S. Gold, only a few weeks ago, to issue a strongly worded, 50-page opinion, reprimanding prosecutors from the US Attorney's office, and requiring the government to pay $600,000 in sanctions for Mr. Acosta's subordinates' misdeeds.

Although the gracious Prof. Wasserman says at Prawfsblog that the public nature of the FIU Dean search did not affect the outcome, one can't help wondering. Once a local reporter mistakenly identified Mr. Acosta as a leading candidate (when he was in fact at the top of a very long alphabetical list), that made it much more difficult for him not to be shortlisted. The faculty may or may not have wanted him. Then again, we don't know whether the other top candidates kept their hats in the ring, or whether this is something FIU law faculty member and irascible columnist Stanley Fish lobbied for, or FIU President Mitch Maidique just wanted.

I hope FIU Law prospers under Dean Acosta — their students and faculty deserve it, and it's certainly good for us intellectually to have another thriving faculty so near by.

Meanwhile, I'm happy about our new Dean. (See Patricia D. White to Be Dean of University of Miami School of Law.)

Posted in Law School, Miami | 7 Comments

Studies in Comparative Stress Reduction

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Blenderlaw catches something at fighting stress in the uk and in miami:

The BBC and the Miami Herald both addressed the issue of how to fight stress this week. The proposed solutions aren’t exactly the same. Top of the BBC’s list are lightboxes – which we don’t need in Miami!

The BBC’s list:

  • lightboxes,
  • get out in the garden,
  • get yourself out of breath,
  • cook a meal from scratch,
  • stroke a cat,
  • pat yourself on the back,
  • take up a lifetime hobby,
  • do something for someone else…for free,
  • seek intimacy and
  • good things take time.

The Miami Herald:

  • exercise,
  • positive thinking,
  • hypnosis,
  • massage,
  • tai chi,
  • yoga,
  • laughter,
  • music,
  • meditation,
  • biofeedback,
  • make a friend,
  • acupuncture and
  • get going.

Blenderlaw again:

There are some similarities here: both lists suggest exercise and positive thinking, for example. But whereas the Miami list is largely focused on what the stressed out person can do for herself, the BBC’s list encourages more looking outwards. Even stroking a cat is presented as being a good thing partly because it involves giving: “in a way we reward ourselves by being nice”. Nowhere does the Miami list suggest that being nice to others or volunteering can help you fight stress.

She's right. But if I were making the Miami stressbusters list, suggestion #1 would be, “Don't drive.”

Posted in Miami, UK | 2 Comments

Minimal Human Decency Abridged

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Fred Grim in the Miami Herald, Florida sex offender policy puts inhumane nightmare under bridge:

No, you think. That can't be. Not after two years. Makes no sense.

But they're still there, a bedraggled colony of outcasts, consigned to the bowels of the Julia Tuttle Causeway — as a matter of public policy.

No, you think. That's impossible. Last winter, state officials promised they'd solve the legal conundrum and international embarrassment that forced 19 sex offenders to live like rats under the concrete support beams of a causeway bridge. The camp's still there. Only the Tuttle bridge population has since grown to 48 men, crammed together in a nether existence of the Kafka kind.

Officially, of course, the state of Florida would never compel ex-offenders to live in unsanitary conditions in the dank underbelly of a freeway bridge, in tents, shacks, cars and two rusting campers. Yet parole officers have made it clear to ex-sex offenders who've served their prison sentences that they have no other options.

City and county laws have created so many overlapping forbidden zones — 2,000 or 2,500 feet from schools, day cares, parks, playgrounds, school bus stops — that the middle of Biscayne Bay has become an ex-offender's only allowable address.

“They check us here every evening. We've got to be here or we go back to prison,” said M.C., 48, who was banished to the bridge after his release from prison two years ago.

How can this be allowed to continue?

Previous posts

Posted in Miami | 25 Comments

Wow! MDPLS Does Wowbrary

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

The good folks at the Miami-Dade Public Library System not only have a great online web-based catalog, but they are participants in the Wowbrary project to provide RSS feeds of new acquisitions by topic.

Check out the RSS Feeds for the Miami-Dade Public Library. They also have similar feeds for many other libraries around the US.

Miami is indeed erratic about providing quality public services — but the public library system is one of our hidden treasures.

Posted in Miami | 1 Comment

Excellent Editorial on the Awful Stadium Deal

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Michael Lewis, writing in Miami Today, summarizes the awfulness of the proposed deal whereby local taxpayers would build an expensive and largely unwanted domed stadium and basically gift it to the owners of the Miami Marlins. See As last-minute facts dribble out, stadium deal gets worse.

This story really has everything. Socialism for rich people. Kleptocracy. Secret deals with all the critical info kept from the public. Commissioners caving. The local newspaper, a pale shadow of its never particularly independent self when it comes to local issues that effect developers' pocketbooks, fully in the tank.

And of course the scandal of more or less wasting many hundreds of millions of dollars that could be spent on more pressing local needs.

(Spotted via Eye on Miami).

Posted in Miami | Comments Off on Excellent Editorial on the Awful Stadium Deal

MoDo Does SoBe’s Canyon Ranch

Posted on January 17, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Maureen Dowd, the New York Times's drama queen of frivolity, takes a vacation in SoBe and pens Canyon Ranch in Miami Beach – What Recession?.

Choice bits:

To find out if spa guilt is rampant, Alessandra and I spent a long weekend at the new Canyon Ranch in the old Carillon Hotel in Miami Beach, which bills itself as the first condo, luxury hotel and wellness spa “of its kind!”

Like other spas, Canyon Ranch hopes to alleviate spa guilt by stressing the holistic benefits of “a deeper wellness,” “a healing energy,” “a Shamanic journey” — rather than simple exfoliating, waxing and cycling. It boasts a sensual 70,000-square-foot spa “where body meets soul” (while money leaves wallet).

But wait, it gets better.

I’d seen someone execute a daring escape from a spa once. Many years ago, when she was single, Nicole Miller, the pretty red-headed clothing designer, had broken out one night from the puritanical Golden Door in Escondido, Calif., and shown up the next morning with a cute guy and a satisfied smile.

At some spas, going AWOL produces a Mother Superior scowl from management. Here, the easygoing staff seems to expect it, even enable it. There’s a hair salon that will wash the massage oil out of your hair, give you a great blow dry and reasonably priced sun streaks, and send you on your way out into the warm night with some cheap dangly earrings.

I called the only person I knew in Miami and asked him to bust us out of there on Saturday night. Fortunately, he was chief of police, my pal John Timoney, so the great escape from Canyon Ranch went flawlessly in his white getaway S.U.V.

Gosh, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard something about Chief Timoney and his SUV? Could it be The Lexus Leprechaun in which the New Times wrote about his unethical and illegal acceptance of a free SUV from a local Lexus dealer? Could it be Miami's Top Cop Breaks the Law in which they described his stonewall when asked to testify about it? Or maybe is was when he had to buy the car at its $54K sticker price? Or that his ethics case was settled for a weeks pay and a $500 fine — which isn't much, but was the largest ethics fine in the history of the county (don't say it)? Or that there were suggestions the Chief might have committed perjury in a sworn statement in the case?

Not that MoDo lets on any hint of all that in her article. And why should she? The Chief took her somewhere nice:

Chief Timoney took us over to the most over-the-top spot in this over-the-top city: the leopard-skin-swathed, stained-glass-filled, Medusa-head-branded Versace mansion, a testament to what one man accomplished by reducing antiquity to a throw pillow.

The mansion, Casa Casuarina, had been turned into a private club but is now open to the public, with a restaurant on its patio that started out in September, and tours of the mannerist upstairs suites. We had a drink in the ornate bar with the owner, Peter Loftin, a mountain of Southern charm, a retired telecommunications mogul who bought the house for $19 million in 2000. Then we ate a sampling from the kitchen: a mound of succulent Kobe beef, fried pork belly, sea scallops with osetra caviar, black grouper, blue prawns cooked at the table on a salt block, foie gras with a riesling-pineapple-coriander emulsion and Meyer lemon tart and crushed amaretti mousse with vanilla-bean meringue, washed down by Champagne (Krug, Clos de Ambonnay 1995), at one of the outdoor tables under a tent by the elaborately tiled pool.

… did the NYT (or the Chief) really buy a champagne that costs $3,500 / bottle at retail? Somebody, or two somebodies, seems seriously overpaid. But then the Chief has long been known for high living and bashing into protesters and others. And it seems he makes $4,300 per week, so I guess he can afford it.

Having been fed and watered (no word about whether “Alessandra” came along), MoDo went back to work:

I had a massage where a woman walked on my back while holding on to rails in the ceiling — not relaxing — and another where I was rubbed down by a cute young Latino massage therapist wielding a mushroom-shaped ball wrapped in linen.

Aren't you glad that Maureen Dowd had a good time? And, in case you are wondering, we never do find out if “spa guilt” is “rampant”. Perhaps next time.

Posted in Miami | 1 Comment