About Jim Seals
My optimism still has me hoping and praying that the arc of civilization will continue to bend toward justice. I believe good writing will help it along because writing is power.
About Me
I had no desire to be a writer until my early forties, despite the urging of my twelfth grade English teacher. I went to Georgia Tech to study engineering but my calculus grades got in the way, so I decided to try law school. My college career began with MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” and JFK’s assassination. I graduated from the University of Florida College of Law the same year Nixon invaded Cambodia, the Chicago Seven went on trial, the first Earth Day, and, oh yes, the break-up of the Beatles. Those years, from 1963 to 1970, changed me from a traditionally conservative, white Southern teenager into a young man who hated war and injustice.
Six years into my law practice in Fort Myers, Florida, I wrote a case-winning brief for the Florida Supreme Court. It convinced me that writing is power. In 1984, after fourteen mostly unfulfilling years in the practice of law, I ran for judge of the County Court for Lee County, Florida, and, at age thirty-nine, was elected. Twenty-one months later I was elevated to the Circuit Court for Florida’s Twentieth Judicial Circuit.
From 1986 to 2012, while sitting as a Circuit Court Judge in Fort Myers, I wrote detailed judgments, orders and rulings, fully explaining my thoughts and reasoning on my cases in the best judicial prose I could muster. I firmly believe my in-depth writing influenced lawyers on the losing side to discourage their clients from appealing my rulings, thus saving a lot of people time and money. Writing is power.
In 1991, after six years of sharpening my judicial writing skills, I concluded that I could write a law-related novel. On Friday nights and Sunday afternoons for the next five or six years, I labored over what my inner hubris believed would be a commercially successful product. The press of work forced me to put the half-finished project aside for about four years. When I finally picked it up again in 2000, I was 55 years old and anxious to get a work of fiction published while I still had what was left of my mind. To my shock I discovered that my magnum opus was an absolute opus horribilis. I made some effort to get it off life support, but I should have observed the “Do Not Resuscitate” warnings stamped across every page. Finally, I pulled the plug and let hundreds of hours of work rest in peace. I whispered up to Heaven an apology to my English teacher for letting her down and resumed my focus on judicial writing.
Where once jurists wrote in the eloquent and elegant style of Jefferson and Lincoln, now far too many of them write in clipped sentences to form boring paragraphs, leaving the reader relieved when finished. I wanted to write like Antonin Scalia. While I didn’t agree with him most of the time, he was indeed the master craftsman of his genre, and left me saying to myself, “Boy, I wish I could write like that guy.” So, for the next twelve years I worked even harder at it. I treated my cases as short stories (which indeed they are) and wrote my judgments, orders and rulings with added literary touches. During the second half of my judicial career my success rate with the appellate courts was even higher than the first. Was it the power of writing, or the wisdom of my advancing age? I can’t say, but I still believe writing is power.
When I retired in 2012, I took another shot at writing a law-related novel. Once finished, I was persuaded to put it aside for a while and concentrate on essays, short stories and op-ed type pieces, and also start a blog. So, here I am, 76 years old, having returned in 2019 to Atlanta, the city of my birth, and starting a new career as a blogger.
This blog will be devoted primarily to my memorable court cases, plus essays on law-related matters. In addition, I’ll post opinion pieces and essays on politics, religion and today’s turbulent culture; and maybe a few chapters from my memoirs. From time to time, I will try my hand at short stories. Perhaps I’ll put out a few chapters from my novel, still out on sabbatical, and see how you like it.
You know my law background. My politics is an admixture of progressive idealism and reality-based pragmatism. I confess to being a devoted Christian, an open-minded, open-hearted Episcopalian who completely agrees with Kierkegaard’s premise that “the problem with Christendom is Christians.” In other words, God isn’t the problem . . . we are. My optimism still has me trying to bend the arc of civilization toward justice. I believe good writing will help it along because writing is power.
Welcome to my blog, and I hope to make some worthwhile contributions to both civil and civic discourse. I look forward to reading your comments, criticisms, suggestions and ideas – I may be old, but I’m still a work in progress.
My Courtroom in Fort Myers, FL