Landmark Cases

In November 2022, Rod Velez won the election for Broward County School Board, District 4. Velez had a felony conviction from the 1990s, but his rights had been restored under Amendment 4 — the constitutional amendment Florida voters approved in 2018 to automatically restore voting rights to people who had completed their sentences. Governor DeSantis took the position that Velez remained disqualified from holding public office, issued an executive order declaring the seat vacant, and appointed a replacement.

The Burton Firm filed suit in Broward County; the case was later transferred to Leon County Circuit Court. The firm petitioned for a writ of quo warranto, asking the court to compel the Governor and his appointee to show by what legal authority they held the seat that Velez had won. The court issued the writ — an extraordinary remedy requiring a sitting governor to legally justify his actions in open court.

The case became a test of Amendment 4’s reach: whether rights restoration extended beyond voting to the right to hold elected office. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board called it a matter of “vital civil rights questions.”

In 2017, President Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and demanded that every state turn over its entire voter file — names, addresses, dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers, voting histories, and party affiliations. Florida’s Secretary of State agreed to comply.

The Burton Firm was among counsel representing a coalition of plaintiffs — including State Representative Arthenia Joyner, the ACLU of Florida, and the Florida Immigrant Coalition — who challenged the mass transfer of sensitive voter data in federal court. The litigation created holdups that contributed to the commission’s dissolution.

The case was selected by the Federal Judicial Center — the research and education arm of the federal judiciary — as a case study in its publication on emergency election litigation.

Raanan Katz, a part owner of the Miami Heat, sued a blogger who had republished an unflattering photograph of him. The blogger had been publicly critical of Katz’s business practices as a commercial landlord. Katz purchased the copyright to the photograph and sued for infringement — an attempt to use intellectual property law as a tool of censorship.

The Burton Firm represented the blogger at the district court level, where the court found fair use and denied Katz’s claims. The decision was affirmed by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the republication of the photograph in the context of criticism and commentary was protected expression.

The case drew national attention as a test of whether copyright law could be weaponized to suppress speech. Forbes ran a column titled “You Can’t Buy a Copyright Just to Bury It.” The Washington Post covered the magistrate judge’s recommendation in detail.

Katherine Murphy was the founding principal of Aventura City of Excellence School. In 2006, the city manager accused her of accepting kickbacks to admit a student outside the school’s waitlist — and terminated her. Murphy alleged that the accusations were fabricated and that the city manager subjected her to years of harassment that destroyed her career in education and caused catastrophic physical harm, including intestinal rupture and a six-week coma.

The Burton Firm tried the case for a month before a Miami-Dade County jury. The jury rejected the city’s defenses and returned a verdict of $155.7 million, the 17th largest in the United States in 2012. The trial court subsequently granted judgment notwithstanding the verdict on sovereign immunity grounds.

When Hurricane Matthew struck Florida in October 2016, it disrupted voter registration in the final days before the registration deadline — leaving thousands of citizens unable to exercise their right to register. The Florida Democratic Party sued Governor Rick Scott and Secretary of State Ken Detzner, arguing that the state’s refusal to extend the deadline deprived storm-affected citizens of a meaningful opportunity to register.

The Burton Firm represented intervenor Sandra Del Castillo in the action. The court granted a preliminary injunction extending the voter registration deadline by seven days, to October 18, 2016, finding that the hurricane had deprived affected citizens of their constitutional right to register to vote.

The case was selected by the Federal Judicial Center — the research and education arm of the federal judiciary — as a case study in emergency election litigation.

In 2022, Governor DeSantis signed a statute broad enough to criminalize election observers for privately communicating vote information to their own party before polls closed — a practice that is fundamental to poll-watching and voter protection operations nationwide.

The Burton Firm represented the Florida Democratic Party and individual election observers in a First Amendment challenge to the statute, arguing that it chilled protected political speech. With the case pending in federal court, the Florida Division of Elections issued an advisory opinion — addressed directly to counsel — stating that the statute would not be enforced against the speech at issue. The court ultimately denied the preliminary injunction, but the advisory opinion had already resolved the dispute in practice. The litigation achieved its objective.