ACS Florida: The Future of Reproductive Rights in Florida

The Florida Supreme Court issued two major decisions last week on the right to reproductive freedom in Florida. With one hand, the Court wrote the right to abortion out of the state constitution, holding that the privacy amendment to the Constitution did not protect a women's right to control her own body. With the other hand, they approved a state ballot initiative that would let Floridians this November put the right to abortion back into the state constitution. Please join the ACS South Florida, North Florida, Tampa, and Central Florida Lawyer Chapters for a panel discussion on the legal and electoral implications of these decisions.

Speakers:

Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law and a nationally recognized expert on abortion rights. She has written six books about reproductive autonomy and the law, including, most recently, Roe: The History of a National Obsession, as well as Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment, Reproduction and the Constitution, and Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Privacy. Before joining the faculty at UC Davis, she was a professor at Florida State University College of Law, where she won several teaching awards.

Courtney Brewer argued and won the abortion rights ballot initiative case before the Florida Supreme Court on behalf of Floridians Protecting Freedom. She spent decades as a leading appellate lawyer in Florida, primarily representing plaintiffs, and served as a deputy solicitor general of Florida and law clerk to former Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Wells. She currently teaches legal research and writing at Florida State University College of Law.

Margaret Good is lawyer at Margaret Good Law. She has worked with Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida as both in-house and outside counsel and serves on the Executive Committee for the Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion. She represented northern Sarasota County in the state legislature from 2018-2020.

Moderator:

Sowmya Bharathi is a first-chair trial attorney and litigation partner at Akerman LLP in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. She has tried 24 case to jury verdict in federal court as a former supervisory assistant federal public defender in the Southern District of Florida.

Introductions:

Jackie Pace Swigler is a corporate attorney and founder of The Jane Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to training, recruiting, and supporting a statewide network of reproductive rights attorneys in Florida. She is a former board member of the Tampa lawyers chapter of ACS and member of the Florida Path to the Bench working group.