R. Lanier Anderson III

Robert Lanier Anderson III (born November 12, 1936) is a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Early life and education

Born on November 12, 1936, in Macon, Georgia, Robert Lanier Anderson III was named for his father and grandfather; his grandfather had been named for Robert Sampson Lanier, the brother-in-law and longtime law partner of his great-grandfather, Clifford Anderson. Robert Lanier and Clifford Anderson started the firm with which all four generations practiced and which, dating from the 1840s and having gone through several iterations, is the second oldest continuous practice in the state of Georgia. Robert Sampson Lanier, was the father of noted poet and musician Sidney Lanier. After graduating from Bibb County, Georgia public schools Anderson earned an Artium Baccalaureus degree from Yale College in 1958, and a Bachelor of Laws from Harvard Law School in 1961.

In 2008, Anderson described himself as a judicial "moderate," and added that he "would like to be thought of as a judge who had no particular agenda and who took each case on the facts and applied the law that the Supreme Court laid down," regardless of his own personal view on it. "And I think that's what I attempt to do, and I think every judge on our court does."

In February 2020, Anderson was a member of a 3-judge panel in Jones et al. v. DeSantis, a 2020 voting rights case. 2018 Florida Amendment 4 permitted former felons to vote, however DeSantis signed a law that required former felons to pay all legal fees before being eligible to vote again, despite some of them not knowing how much they owed. District judge Robert Hinkle struck down that law, and the panel kept the injunction against the law. However, the panel was reversed in a sharply divided en banc decision that September.