# Southern District of Florida The federal **trial** court for south Florida, with courthouses in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Fort Pierce and Key West. It is referenced across more than twenty pages here, and it is where a remarkable share of this wiki's litigation actually started. It currently has **18 active district judges** plus 10 judges in senior status, and is led by **Chief Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga**, who took the role in 2021. Appeals go to the [[Eleventh Circuit]]. ## Why this district specifically Trial courts are usually interchangeable in a knowledge base — the law is the same everywhere and the appellate court is where doctrine gets made. This one is not interchangeable, for a structural reason and a geographic one. **Mar-a-Lago is in it.** That single fact routed the documents prosecution, and much of the civil litigation around it, into this district rather than into Washington. See [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]]. **Case assignment within the district is not uniform.** The district spans several divisions, and the Fort Pierce courthouse has had effectively one active district judge. A case filed in a division with one judge draws that judge. This is how [[Aileen Cannon]] — appointed in 2020, and the most junior judge on the bench at the time — came to preside over the prosecution of a former president. The mechanism is public, ordinary and entirely legal, which is precisely what makes it worth recording: venue selection inside a district can be as consequential as the choice of district. ## The cases that start here | Case or matter | Judge | Page | |---|---|---| | The classified-documents prosecution of Donald Trump | [[Aileen Cannon]] | [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]] | | Trump's RICO suit against Hillary Clinton and others — dismissed as time-barred and meritless, with sanctions | [[Donald Middlebrooks]] | [[Trump v. Clinton]] | | The 2007–08 non-prosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, negotiated by the then–U.S. Attorney | — | [[Epstein Non-Prosecution Agreement]] | The Epstein agreement is the district's other long shadow. It was signed by the office of the U.S. Attorney for this district, Alex Acosta, who later became Trump's Labor Secretary. See [[Alex Acosta]] and [[Jeffrey Epstein]]. ## Why it matters - **Venue is a strategy, not an accident.** Filing in south Florida means this district's judges and the Eleventh Circuit on appeal. Several of the suits covered here were filed rather than where the defendants are. - **It is the clearest illustration of single-judge division risk.** The Fort Pierce assignment is the concrete answer to how judge-shopping works in practice, without anyone having to break a rule. - **It is the hinge between district and circuit.** Read with [[Eleventh Circuit]], this gives the full path a Florida case travels: a trial judge whose assignment may turn on which courthouse the complaint was filed in, reviewed by a twelve-judge bench half of which was seated in a single presidential term. ## See Also - [[Eleventh Circuit]] — the appellate court above it - [[United States District Courts]] · [[Federal Judiciary Tree]] · [[Judiciary Hub]] - [[Aileen Cannon]] · [[Donald Middlebrooks]] · [[Kathleen Williams]] — judges of this district covered here - [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]] · [[Trump v. Clinton]] · [[Epstein Non-Prosecution Agreement]] - [[Alex Acosta]] · [[Jeffrey Epstein]]