Judges in Florida should take advice from the country music song and “find out who your friends are.” According to the Law Blog of the Wall Street Journal, Sunshine State jurists have been advised by the Florida Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee (FJEAC) to avoid becoming Facebook “friends” with lawyers who may appear before them in court.
Facebook is a social networking website that allows its 350 million + users to “friend” other users. By creating a network of Facebook friends, users are then able to share personal information, stories, articles, pictures, videos, and a host of applications with people on their network. While the website began as a social tool for college students, it has since expanded to become an all-purpose utility for businesses, charities, organizations, and individuals to share their products, causes, and messages across the world wide web (Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts has a Facebook page, join us as a fan). Users can become “fans” of the myriad organizations with pages on the website and thereby stay informed through updates.
Political candidates, including judges in states that still elect judges in popular elections, often create Facebook pages as a means of developing support and distributing information to those interested. And though many working folks prefer to use websites devoted to the career-minded (such as LinkedIn) for their online professional networking, Facebook is becoming an increasingly popular destination for such vocational contact-exchanges.
According to the Law Blog, “while [Facebook] ‘friending’ connotes a level of intimacy greater than, say, an exchange of business cards, it falls well short of establishing or confirming true friendship.” The FJEAC, however, considers the social component of Facebook to great a threat to the independence of judges, and issued this advisory opinion. The opinion poses a series of questions and brief answers, followed by this explanation:
"The Committee believes that listing lawyers who may appear before the judge as “friends” on a judge’s social networking page reasonably conveys to others the impression that these lawyer “friends” are in a special position to influence the judge. This is not to say, of course, that simply because a lawyer is listed as a “friend” on a social networking site or because a lawyer is a friend of the judge, as the term friend is used in its traditional sense, means that this lawyer is, in fact, in a special position to influence the judge. The issue, however, is not whether the lawyer actually is in a position to influence the judge, but instead whether the proposed conduct, the identification of the lawyer as a “friend” on the social networking site, conveys the impression that the lawyer is in a position to influence the judge. The Committee concludes that such identification in a public forum of a lawyer who may appear before the judge does convey this impression and therefore is not permitted."
Whether or not this is a trend that other states will follow is yet to be seen. In Pennsylvania, there is currently no such requirement. In fact, there is not even a requirement that a judge recuse his or herself from a case involving a party or attorney who has contributed money to the judge’s election campaign.
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