Mitchell L. Silverman, Esquire

Who is Mitchell L. Silverman, Esquire?

My professional interests are wills, trusts, and estates; probate law; commercial law; and media and First Amendment law, especially as they relate to the Internet and the World Wide Web.  I keep my costs down to keep my fees reasonable, and I don't charge for initial consultations. I focus on practical, prompt, and client-oriented service.  I am also committed to resolving my clients' disputes without resorting to litigation; while I was at the FSU College of Law I concentrated in Dispute Resolution and became certified as a County Court Mediator.

I'm also starting to get interested in property law — my property law professor, Robert E. Atkinson, had a long-delayed effect on me.

Nothing here constitutes the practice of law, nor is it legal advice.  No professional relationship can be deemed to exist between myself and anyone else based on anything on this webpage.  Reading this webpage constitutes acceptance of my disclaimer.  For a broader disclaimer, which I point to as both example and caution, see the disclaimer at California attorney Jay Foonberg's website.

Dispute Resolution

On November 20, 1998, I became a Florida Supreme Court-certified County Court Mediator. I took Mediation during my last year in law school. Sharon Press, Director of the Florida Office of the State Courts Administrator's Florida Dispute Resolution Center taught the course, which included the requirements for County Court Mediation certification. I received the high grade in the class — "booking" the course. I'm committed to the ideas and ideals of mediation. For more information about mediation, see Perry Itkin's blog, Florida Mediator, one of my favorite blogs.

No, really — who is Mitch Silverman?

I'm an attorney at law, a member of the Florida Bar.  I took Florida's Oath of Attorney in a version stripped of its religious language (as I had asked the Florida Board of Bar Examiners for leave to do). I believe that there is a Constitutional (and, specifically, an Establishment Clause) problem with a governmental body requiring me to swear an oath, especially one that ends with "So help me God." (See UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh's article about the controversy over Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison's swearing-in for more about this.)

Here is the (more usual) oath of attorney in Florida on the Florida Bar's website, http://www.flabar.org.

I'm a bon vivant (on the cheap), trivialist, paronomasiac, and enthusiastic infomaniac, dabbler, and jack of all trades. I'm a proud alumnus of Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH (where Dave Chappelle lives); a happy graduate of Broward Community College, Ft. Lauderdale, FL (where Harry Crews first taught); a enthusiastic graduate (and extremely supportive alumnus) of New College of Florida, in Sarasota, FL (for which I give much credit to my academic and thesis sponsor A. M. "Mac" Miller); and a graduate of the Florida State University College of Law.

As of the beginning of Spring Semester 2008 (January 2008), I am halfway through a master's degree in Information Studies — what used to be called library science — at the Florida State University College of Information. I intend to become a law librarian in an academic or special library.

My contribution to the world of free/open-source software (F/OSS) is to (heavily) revise a VBScript I downloaded from Lifehacker that tracks time automatically in an Excel spreadsheet, by automating Excel (which is an irony — using F/OSS to control Microsoft Office software). The original VBScript is available here. A list of my revisions and links to the latest version and my blog entries about it are available here.

Consider, if you will, my resume, in PDF form.

My Outlook on Life

I just try to follow the Golden Rule (Hillel's version). I consider myself a feminist, but certainly not of the politically correct variety.  My favorite movie is Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

My Interests

My interests include hypertext (I wrote, or tried to, a hypertext thesis at New College); civil rights and civil liberties, especially First Amendment freedoms in Florida and the U.S. (including privacy — here are my personal and professional  PGP keys), religious pluralism and the separation of church and state; Judaism, Reconstructionist and otherwise; freethought; anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and the other social sciences; technology; science fiction and science fiction fandom (from which I get the closing "YHOS"); libertarianism and limited government; federal and Florida state open government and open records laws; and commercial law and contract law in general.

I'm a member of the ACLU of Florida; the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil-liberties organization; the American Library Association; the American Society for Information Science and Technology; the American Association of Law Libraries; and the South Florida Association of Law Libraries (which membership is pending).

I am not currently a member of the national ACLU, as I disagree with several of their policies. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero signed a completely voluntary agreement with the Federal government agreeing to follow Federal blackisting laws with respect to allegedly terrorist organizations. This means that the ACLU screens its employees against a Federal "watch list." The ACLU uses data mining techniques on its membership lists to uncover potential sources of funding. As well, the ACLU attempted to censor its board members who disagreed with these policies. Former dissident ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer has commented about and written stories about the blacklisting controversy and the national ACLU's censorship of its board members, and the New York Times has covered the ACLU's data mining of its members.

BoingBoing

BoingBoing, "A Directory of Wonderful Things," is one of my favorite blogs. I mentioned to a friend that I had, in fact, been BoingBoinged twice, and he said he knew, and said that I must have mentioned this on my website, right?

Here's a link to the blog post in which I discuss being BoingBoinged.

BoingBoing live!

Boing Boing: a Directory of Wonderful Things

get this for your page

Some Illuminating Quotations

The Golden Rule

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary [the explanation]; go and study it.

— Rabbi Hillel the Elder, Babylonian Talmud, tractate Shabbat, page 31a. (c. 30 B.C.E.)

Feasibility

It often happens, with regard to new inventions, that one part of the general public finds them useless and another part considers them to be impossible. When it becomes clear that the possibility and the usefulness can no longer be denied, most agree that the whole thing was fairly easy to discover and that they knew about it all along.

— Abraham Edelcrantz (Abraham Niclas Clewberg), A Treatise on Telegraphs (1796), quoted in Holzmann, Gerard J., and Björn Pehrson, "The First Data Networks," Scientific American, v. 270, no. 1 (January 1994): 124-129.