How to honor Sandy D’Alemberte

Florida lost one of its greatest citizens when Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte died of a heart attack Monday. The people lost a lifelong champion of open government and fair courts. The legal profession lost someone who embodied its highest ideals and inspired others. The poor and powerless here and around the world lost a friend.

He will be remembered with gratitude, but that should be accompanied by everyone’s commitment and service to the high principles he served.

The many things he did for his fellow citizens and the battles he won wouldn’t fit on a tombstone. They would take up an entire wall.

But if he were to be eulogized in a single phrase, it would be what his widow and law partner, Patsy Palmer, said:

“He loved the rule of law.”

That makes his death so poignant now. The rule of law is under assault near and far.

In Tallahassee, the Legislature voted to subvert both Amendment 4, the recent ex-felons voting rights initiative, and the entire petition process that D’Alemberte as a legislator helped to write into the Constitution in 1968. Governors appointing judges according to their ideology have corrupted the merit-selection system that D’Alemberte enshrined in the Constitution in 1972, the last of his six years as a legislator from Miami.

In Washington, an arrogant president chooses which laws, if any, he will obey, and the attorney general is his servile courtier rather than a guardian of the rule of law.

Right-wing legislatures throughout the Midwest and South are enacting abortion bans that invite the U.S. Supreme Court to betray settled precedent and rescind Roe v.

Wade.

Those who revered D’Alemberte for his ideals and his selflessness can best honor him by carrying on his unfinished work: keeping the courts fair and just and the government accountable to the people.

From a hospital bed where he was recovering from knee surgery, he had mused on how to help overturn the Legislature’s cynical sabotage of Amendment 4. He asked daily about the still-pending appellate court decision in his last great case: to reverse a billionaire developer’s outrageous $4.4 million SLAPP suit verdict against a citizen who had opposed his rock mine in Martin County. If he couldn’t overturn that, he had said, “I ought to be disbarred.”

That citizen is the environmentalist Maggy Hurchalla, last sibling of the late U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, whose career D’Alemberte had launched by appointing her staff director of the House committee that would give Florida a modern, efficient and uniform judicial system.

Afterward, D’Alemberte was the prosecutor for a legislative impeachment inquiry that procured the resignation of a corrupt Supreme Court justice. Later, he overcame the skepticism of the court and the entire American judiciary to allow cameras in all Florida courtrooms, and to livestream all of the court’s own proceedings, including the monumental presidential election contest in 2000.

Along the way, he chaired the Constitution Revision Commission of 1978, served as dean of the Florida State University College of Law and later as president of FSU. Between those tenures, he was president of the American Bar Association, where he marshaled American lawyers to help Eastern European countries learn democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He continued to teach law parttime as FSU’s president emeritus. Two seminars were on the fall schedule he did not live to keep. He was 85, with no plans to retire.

What set him above and apart from other accomplished people was his relentless passion for causes in the public interest — most of them undertaken without fee. Saving a reporter from jail for revealing innocuous grand jury secrets. Advocating for condemned prisoners. Persuading the Florida Supreme court to declare that all lawyers have an obligation to perform pro bono service. Open government. Compensation for men wrongly imprisoned for 17 and 27 years. Admission to the Florida Bar for one of his law students, and others like him, who had been undocumented childhood immigrants

“Professor D’Alemberte was a great man. He was my professor, attorney and friend,” wrote that former student, José Manuel Godinez Samperio, who practices U.S., Mexican and international law from an office in Hidalgo, Mexico. “He made sure that I graduated…helping me obtain scholarships…he represented me pro bono before every branch of government… it took me three and a half years to be licensed.”

“He was a special friend to all reporters,” wrote Lucy Morgan, a retired Tampa Bay Times journalist whom he had saved from jail by persuading the Florida Supreme Court that a state attorney had no compelling need to know who had leaked a grand jury secret to her.

A lifelong liberal — George McGovern’s Florida campaign chairman in 1972 — the soft-spoken D’Alemberte had a special knack for befriending people whose opinions he was unlikely to share, the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia among them.

“Sandy was a force of nature,” said Florida Chief Justice Charles T. Canady, a prominent legal conservative. “If I had to choose any one person as the most important mover and shaker behind Florida’s open government movement in the Twentieth Century, it would be Sandy D’Alemberte. He is the main reason Florida’s courts have been open to cameras for the last 40 years.”

With his earnest face, soft voice and trademark bow ties, D’Alemberte personified the courtly manners of his Florida forebears.

“If he had an angry bone in his body, he was never open about it to the public,” remarked former Gov. Bob Graham, who had served with him in the Legislature.

We said at the outset that it would take an entire wall to memorialize D’Alemberte properly. There happens, however, to be one where just a few words would do.

It’s the outside wall of the building housing the FSU College of Law. It should bear his name.

It presently honors B.K. Roberts, a justice who helped establish the law school. The university is trying to remove his name, as recommended by a committee of students, faculty and alumni, because Roberts was a racist who led the Florida court’s successful defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court order to admit a black man, Virgil Hawkins, to the University of Florida’s law school. In April, the Florida Senate voted 34-1 for FSU’s request, but the bill got nowhere in the House.

FSU President John Thrasher, who was D’Alemberte’s protégé on the impeachment staff in 1975, says the university will try again in 2020, with a local bill that would rename the building for D’Alemberte.

D’Alemberte might protest that, if he could. He had disapproved privately of removing the Roberts name because he thought it would disrespect history. But it was a shameful history that deserves disrespect, and Roberts had outside legal fees that were unethical.

D’Alemberte stood for impeccable ethics and unshakeable devotion to equal justice under law. His name belongs on that wall.

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Sergio Bustos, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.