Stanley Marcus

Stanley Marcus (born 1946) is an American jurist who serves as the senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He was previously a former United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Early life, education and legal training

Marcus was born and raised in New York City, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Queens College, City University of New York, magna cum laude, in 1967. He earned his Juris Doctor from the Harvard Law School in 1971. Marcus also served on active duty in the United States Army in 1969, and served in the United States Army Reserve through 1974.

Legal career

Marcus clerked for United States District Judge John R. Bartels from 1971 until 1973, and joined the New York law firm of Botein, Hays, Sklar and Herzberg as an associate in 1974. He became an Assistant United States Attorney in Brooklyn in 1975, and in 1978 was assigned to the United States Attorney's Office in Detroit, Michigan as Deputy Chief of the "Detroit Strike Force," which investigated organized crime in Michigan. In 1980, Marcus was appointed the Chief of the Detroit Strike Force, Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the United States Department of Justice. In 1982, Marcus left Detroit and became the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, in Miami, Florida. Even though the Senate at that time was controlled by Republicans, Marcus's nomination was considered to be very uncontroversial. The United States Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously voted in favor of Marcus's nomination on November 6, 1997, and the full Senate unanimously confirmed him on November 7, 1997. "I'm deeply honored," Marcus told the Miami Herald in a brief interview in an article that appeared on November 8, 1997. He received his commission on November 12, 1997.

Notable cases

In 2004, Marcus dissented when the court refused to rehear a case where the initial panel upheld a law banning LGBTQ couples from adopting children. The vote was 6–6, which warranted a denial of rehearing en banc. Marcus was joined by Gerald Bard Tjoflat and Charles R. Wilson, and Judges Barkett, Anderson, and Dubina filed separate dissents.

In February 2020, Marcus 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.

In the 2021 case Burns v. Palm Beach, Marcus penned a lengthy dissent in which he argued that the First Amendment's protection of artistic expression extends to stylistic choices in residential architecture, subjecting aesthetic zoning measures to heightened constitutional scrutiny.

Marcus was one of 3 judges who ruled that Alabama's proposed redistricting maps were unlawful under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The 3 judge panel's ruling was upheld in Allen v. Milligan.