Few inside the felony community doubt Florida legal professional Bruce Rogow’s prowess and integrity. He reduces his teeth as a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi in the Nineteen Sixties, supplying felony help to the flood of civil rights employees looking to give up segregation within the deep South. He then devoted himself to assisting the bad, becoming assistant director of Greater Miami Legal Services.
Since then, he’s become a famous First Amendment and constitutional lawyer, arguing eleven times earlier than the U.S. Supreme Court — more than any other Florida attorney. He also has been recommending in rankings of instances on the Florida Supreme Court and has argued greater than 450 civil and crook instances in federal and country appellate courts.
But Rogow is now inside the limelight because of the legal professional representing longtime Republican operative and staunch Donald Trump’s best friend Roger Stone.
Stone, who changed into arrested in January at his Fort Lauderdale domestic in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, deals with charges of witness tampering, obstructing an official intending, and five counts of making fake statements.
The course from civil rights lawyer in the deep South to defender of a Republican Party political operative is on its face an unconventional trajectory. But to the seventy-nine-year-antique Rogow, there may be little distinction between protecting civil rights activists in Mississippi and his cutting-edge paintings for Stone.
“People are worthy of defense, in particular, whilst their liberty is on the line,” he said.
Even as Stone faces a finding of contempt for allegedly breaking his gag order, at the beginning instituted for an Instagram publish featuring the presiding judge after the obvious crosshairs of a rifle scope, Rogow stands by using him. He compares Stone’s cultural radioactivity to some other considered one of his high-profile, controversial customers: Alan Dershowitz. The retired Harvard regulation professor became concerned in a cadre of suits and countersuits stemming from claims related to former client Jeffery Epstein’s intercourse crimes research and allegations linking Dershowitz to the underage intercourse scandal.
“Did Alan Dershowitz do anything that advised me that I should no longer represent him? The solution is definitely now not. The identical thing with Roger Stone,” Rogow said. ”Each of their very exclusive approaches is a mensch — an excellent person.”
Rogow, who changed into a regulation professor for forty years at Nova Law School in Fort Lauderdale, and later dean, admits he has a form of magnetism for oversized characters. During his fifty-five years as a legal professional, he has represented rap artist Luther Campbell, also referred to as Uncle Luke, from 2 Live Crew; Seminole Tribe Chief James Billie, a former alligator wrestler who built the Seminole Tribe into a first-rate business enterprise; Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; and Trump.
He also has treated numerous cases for the president’s loose community of companies, including some that arose from club membership and vendor disputes. In 2017, as an example, he took on the appeal for Trump in litigation towards a Trump-assisting Florida painter who had gained $three hundred,000 in repayment and damages after the Trump Organization did not pay for a golf route preservation. Rogow lost the appeal.
Despite his defense of arguable clients, Rogow is near-universally respected in Florida.
“He is the most strategic, wisest, thoughtful, and ethical legal professional I even have ever met in my entire career,” stated Bobby Gilbert, a name accomplice at Kopelowitz Ostrow Ferguson Weiselberg Gilbert in South Florida. Gilbert has worked intently with Rogow for extra than twenty years, maximum substantially on a series of class actions towards banks for predatory overdraft expenses that fetched a complete $1.2 billion.
Ira Leesfield, a Miami legal professional and staple of Florida Democratic politics, had a similar take.
“I simply have an international of respect for him. Bruce is considered one of a kind,” he stated.
Whilst the American Civil Liberties Union is beneath assault for continuing its policy of protecting hate companies. A Harvard professor, Ron Sullivan, has been criticized for representing former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, Rogow’s legacy is that of a steadfast purist: someone who believes that who you represent isn’t always who you are; that everyone, no matter how unpopular or vile, deserves energetic protection.
Intolerance
In Rogow’s modest Fort Lauderdale office — for years he’s shared a table with his accomplice — a framed New York Times article dated June 12, 1972, and headlined “High Court Bars Any Jail Sentence Without Counsel,” chronicles the selection on Rogow’s first U.S. Supreme Court case, Argersinger v. Hamlin, which held that defendants, even the ones facing misdemeanor costs, have the proper to counsel whilst the crime they’re charged with contains a penalty of feasible imprisonment. His office is festooned with similar presentations.
