From Creative Loafing Tampa:
Op-ed: Vote ‘No’ on retaining Florida Supreme Court Justice Carlos Muñiz
On Nov. 3, Florida voters will find a question near the bottom of the ballot that most will skip: “Shall Justice Carlos G. Muñiz of the Supreme Court be retained in office?” Don’t skip it.
We do not make this recommendation lightly, but vote “No.” Merit retention is not a referendum on whether voters like a judge’s politics, and we have long resisted treating it as one. It asks something narrower: Has this justice done the job the way it is supposed to be done? The answer this time turns on a principle older than any of the controversies before the court today.
That principle is stare decisis, Latin for “to stand by things decided.” When a court has answered a question, it keeps that answer unless there is an overwhelming reason to change it. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it plainly nearly a century ago. In most matters, he wrote, “it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right.”
That can sound strange. Shouldn’t courts always get it right? But Brandeis understood something essential. Every judge believes they are right; that is why judges disagree. If each new majority were free to undo the work of the last, the law would mean whatever the most recent appointments say it means. Families, businesses, doctors and patients could not plan their lives around a law that shifts with the court’s membership. Settled law is not a concession to error. It is the backbone of the rule of law, the principle that courts are bound by more than just the fleeting preferences of whoever holds power at the moment.
Florida’s Supreme Court once took that principle seriously. Before overruling a precedent, it asked a series of questions. Has the rule proved unworkable? Have people come to rely on it? Have the facts or the law changed? In 2020, shortly after Justice Muñiz arrived on the court with no prior judicial experience, the DeSantis appointee joined a majority that discarded that framework. From now on, the court said, it would overrule a precedent whenever a majority found it “clearly erroneous.” Reliance and stability would no longer carry independent weight. The case was a death-penalty appeal, but the rule it announced reaches every area of Florida law.
Nowhere has the cost been clearer than on abortion.
In 1980, Florida voters did something most states never did. They added an explicit right of privacy to their constitution, protecting every person’s right “to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion” into private life. Nine years later, in “In re T.W.,” a unanimous Florida Supreme Court held that this right protects a woman’s decision whether to end a pregnancy. That court included justices appointed by governors of both parties, and one member who had helped shape the privacy amendment itself.
The ruling was not an outlier that slipped by unnoticed. The court reaffirmed it in2017 and again in 2003. For 35 years, Floridians, their doctors and their legislators organized their lives and laws around it. Whatever one thinks of abortion, that is exactly what settled law looks like.
In April 2024, Justice Muñiz joined the majority that swept it away. The court held that the privacy clause had never protected abortion at all. That decision immediately triggered a six-week ban, earlier than many women know they are pregnant. Nothing in the constitution’s text had changed. The facts had not changed. What had changed was the court’s membership.
At oral argument, Justice Muñiz openly questioned whether the court should keep recognizing the right. In a separate opinion that year, he wrote of a “pre-constitutional, objective moral reality” in the constitution’s Declaration of Rights. Anti-abortion advocates read that passage as a signal that the court might go further still. A justice who treats a 35-year-old precedent as an open question, and invites the next challenge in the same breath, has not settled the law. He has unsettled it.
Justice Jorge Labarga, alone in dissent, did not mince words. “Roe v. Wade” had dominated public debate for seven years when Floridians adopted their privacy amendment in 1980. That dominance, he wrote, “makes it inconceivable that in 1980, Florida voters did not associate abortion with the right of privacy.” He lamented that the majority had supplanted “Florida voters’ understanding—then and now,” and he dissented “with deep dismay.” Justice Labarga was appointed by a Republican governor and has served as chief justice himself. For six years he has been the court’s lone voice warning that Florida law is being rewritten not because the law changed, but because the court’s membership did.
The same approach has reached the civil courthouse. In 2020 the court, on its own initiative, abandoned a summary-judgment standard Florida had followed since 1966. That standard kept genuinely disputed cases before juries. Unable to call its own precedent clearly erroneous, the court simply rewrote the rule. Justice Muñiz joined. Justice Labarga “strongly” dissented, warning of the intrusion on the role our Constitution gives to juries.
Some will argue that a “no” vote politicizes the courts. The opposite is true. Merit retention exists so that voters can hold accountable the justices they never chose. No Florida Supreme Court justice has ever lost a retention election, which means this check exists in theory only.
Readers who welcomed the court’s abortion ruling should ask themselves a question. Would they accept the next majority reversing it just as easily? A right that lasts only until the next appointment is no right at all. That is true of every right, not just the ones we favor.
Better that the law be settled than settled right. Justice Muñiz has chosen otherwise. Voters should decline to retain him.
Creative Loafing Tampa Bay accepts letters to the editors and op-ed pitches. We will not run your letter without permission. Email your submissions to rroa@cltampa.com for consideration.
This article appears in Oct. 08 – 14, 2026.
