Judge in Disney-DeSantis Dispute Known for Torching GOP Policies

The Florida federal judge handling Walt Disney Co.’s lawsuit against Ron DeSantis has ruled against the Republican governor in previous high-profile cases, including last year blocking the governor’s “anti-woke” restrictions on workplace diversity training and university instruction.

Mark E. Walker has called laws championed by Republicans racist and dystopian and drawn public rebukes from DeSantis who accused him of “performative partisanship.”

Being in the center of partisan culture wars is an unexpected turn for Walker, a life-long Floridian and President Barack Obama nominee, confirmed unanimously by the Senate in 2012.

“I am surprised by the criticism that has been put his way,” said retired state Judge Charles Dodson, who served alongside Walker in Florida’s Second Judicial Circuit in Tallahassee before Walker’s federal appointment. “I’m not surprised that Mark is not afraid to make a ruling following the law that may be interpreted by some people as being a bold ruling and controversial.”

Walker has served since 2018 as chief judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida. The court hears a large portion of the constitutional challenges brought against newly enacted state laws and other cases involving DeSantis, given its location in the state capital.

The Disney litigation is too early stage to glean any hints of how Walker views the case. Disney, which filed an amended complaint May 8, is accusing DeSantis of retaliating against the corporation’s exercise of free speech by taking control of its local governing district. The governing board—now under the control of DeSantis appointees—has countersued Disney in state court in Orlando.

Walker declined to comment and DeSantis’s press office didn’t respond to a request.

Winn-Dixie

Walker, born in 1967, grew up outside Orlando in Winter Garden, Fla., where his father managed the local Winn-Dixie grocery store, the Tallahassee Democrat reported in 2012.

As a teenager, Walker became an Eagle Scout and worked part time at Winn-Dixie from the age of 15 through college and law school at the University of Florida. “I think probably more than anything I did in law school or in college that made me prepared to be a lawyer and interact with people,” Walker said of his time at Winn-Dixie in an interview with the Democrat in 2009.

Walker has spent his entire career in Florida, except for a yearlong clerkship with Eleventh Circuit Judge Emmett Ripley Cox in Mobile, Ala. He also clerked for a former Florida Supreme Court chief justice and Robert Hinkle, who is now his colleague on the Northern District of Florida, experiences that made him realize he’d like to be a judge himself, the Democrat reported.

He worked as a public defender and then at several Tallahassee law firms specializing in civil litigation and criminal defense before winning election to a state circuit judgeship in 2009. Former colleagues at the state court said he had a reputation as a good listener, who earned the respect of both defense attorneys and prosecutors.

“There’s that expression ‘work smarter, not harder.’ He did both,” never being the type to limit himself to standard 9-to-5 work days, said Karen Gievers, a retired state judge from the Second Judicial Circuit. “He’s very bright and very sensitive to the humanity side of judging.”

Three years later came nomination to the federal bench, where his supporters included home state Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.

Hinkle, who is one of two other active judges on the federal court, called Walker “the brightest, hardest working, best prepared, and most intellectually honest participant in any proceeding he presides over.”

Lawyers arguing a case before Walker should come prepared for thorough questioning from the judge, said Mohammad O. Jazil, an attorney with Holtzman Vogel Baran Torchinsky & Josefiak PLLC in Tallahassee who has argued multiple cases in Walker’s court including 2018 election recount disputes.

“He tends to use the Socratic method,” Jazil said. “He goes from topic to topic giving lawyers from both sides a chance to address the issues on his mind.”

Walker once recused himself from hearing a 2019 voting rights lawsuit because the elections officials defending against the suit hired attorney George Meros from Holland & Knight LLP—the same firm where the judge’s wife Karen D. Walker is a partner. In a previous 2015 case, Walker declined to recuse himself when defendants hired Meros halfway through the litigation, a move that Walker criticized as an scheme to force him off the case.

DeSantis Showdowns

Since joining the federal bench, Walker has found his decisions frequently at odds with the state’s Republican governors.

His court has heard at least 34 cases in which the State of Florida is a defendant during the DeSantis and Rick Scott administrations, including 30 civil rights lawsuits, according to Bloomberg Law data.

DeSantis denounced his March 2022 decision striking down parts of a Florida voting law as the “judicial equivalent of just pounding the table” when the law and the facts aren’t on your side.

Walker’s 300-page opinion suggested the election law was part of a long history of Florida Republicans disenfranchising Black voters. The decision blocked enforcement of limits on the use of absentee ballot drop boxes and third-party voter registration groups.

The Eleventh Circuit overturned Walker’s voting law ruling in a 2-1 panel decision on April 28, finding no discriminatory intent in the Florida law. The conservative-leaning appellate court has affirmed only 59.5% of Walker decisions, compared with 85.3% for all active district court judges within the Eleventh Circuit, according to Bloomberg Law data. Six of the appellate court’s 11 active judges were appointed by Donald Trump.

Walker also blocked portions of a 2022 law that DeSantis touted as part of an “anti-woke” crusade.

The judge found that provisions of the law restricting employers as well as university professors from espousing critical race theory and related concepts violated the First Amendment. In separate opinions, Walker invoked George Orwell’s book “1984” to call them dystopian and compared them to the “upside down” realm from the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” The governor’s appeals of those decisions are pending at the Eleventh Circuit.

‘Locked in a Dark Crypt’

In a 2021 decision partly blocking enforcement of Florida’s recently passed anti-riot law, Walker likened potential abuses of the new law to the arrest of activists during the civil rights movement using Florida’s vaguely defined anti-riot law six decades earlier.

“In 1956 and 1961, Florida’s anti-riot laws were used to suppress activities threatening the state’s Jim Crow status quo,” Walker wrote.

“What’s past is prologue,” he added. “Now this Court is faced with a new definition of ‘riot’—one that the Florida Legislature created following a summer of nationwide protest for racial justice, against police violence and the murder of George Floyd and many other people of color, and in support of the powerful statement that Black lives matter.”

Walker has similarly ruled against the policies of DeSantis’s predecessor, Rick Scott (R).

He ruled in a 2018 opinion that Florida’s process for restoring voting rights to ex-felons was arbitrary and unconstitutional.

On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit dismissed the case as moot after Florida voters passed a ballot measure to automatically restore voting rights after a felon completes their sentence. But at the time of Walker’s decision, the state required former felons who had completed their sentences to request that a state panel led by the governor approve them to vote, with no clear criteria or timeline for state officials to determine who would be approved or when applicants might get a hearing.

Walker condemned the system as unconstitutional in his characteristically colorful language, opining that after a felon has completed their prison sentence, their voting rights “remain locked in a dark crypt.”

“Only the state has the key—but the state has swallowed it,” Walker wrote. Those rights could be unlocked “only when the state has digested and passed that key in the unforeseeable future—maybe in five years, maybe in 50—along with the possibility of some virus-laden stew of viewpoint discrimination and partisan, religious, or racial bias.”