Did Florida's attorney general break the law during a Martin Luther King Day legal stunt?

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Apr 27, 2026

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Back in January — on Martin Luther King Jr. Day — Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued a legal opinion in which he declared that his office would no longer enforce more than 80 state laws on the books meant to help understand and undo some of the harms caused by historic racial discrimination.

No one had independently asked Uthmeier to resolve a genuine legal ambiguity. Instead, Florida’s never-elected attorney general took it upon himself to unilaterally declare laws requiring “race-based state actions” to be unconstitutional. “I requested, and I am now giving, an official opinion…” Uthmeier wrote in the Jan. 19 opinion.

The self-initiated opinion was, at minimum, an unusual maneuver. But Uthmeier cited a specific state law as his authority to act on his own accord.

Florida statutes can be quite complicated and dense. Fortunately, though, the one that Uthmeier invoked — 16.01(3) — is fairly simple and straightforward.

That law does indeed give the attorney general the power to issue an official opinion in response to a request from certain government officials who are unclear about their legal duties. In fact, it compels the attorney general to weigh in when the request comes from a member of the Cabinet — like the attorney general himself.

But it also requires that the request be made in writing.

So I decided to get a copy of it. On Jan. 21, I made a public records request of the Attorney General’s Office for the request that James Uthmeier had made to himself that led James Uthmeier to opine that dozens of duly enacted state laws dealing with racial discrimination were unconstitutional and unenforceable.

It’s a small thing, to be sure. But my thinking was that seeing what should essentially be a letter to himself might drive home the combined clownishness and menace of his behavior.

It took the Attorney General’s Office three months to respond — though Uthmeier’s staff assured me it was in process when I pestered them. “We are working on your request,” Darya Massoudi, a deputy attorney general for public records, wrote in an April 13 email.

It wasn’t until last week — when I told them that I was going to write a story about why it was taking so long for the attorney general to produce a copy of a request he made to himself — that they finally fessed up:

Uthmeier never actually wrote a request.

Instead, the Attorney General’s Office sent me a letter arguing that he was not required to do so. The letter read like the legal equivalent of throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something would stick.

Uthmeier’s staff claimed, for instance, that nothing in law required him to put his request for an opinion in writing (except, of course, for the very statute he cited). They insisted he had “broad common law authority” to issue an opinion of his own accord (though they cited no actual cases or rulings). And then they took the position that his request was written into the April 19 opinion itself (even though Uthmeier had used the past tense when he wrote that he had “requested” the opinion).

You can read the statute and decide for yourself whether you think it leaves the kind of wiggle room that Uthmeier’s office claims.

But also remember that James Uthmeier has a history of bending the law to the point of breaking.

Less than a year ago, for instance, a federal judge held him in contempt for defying court orders in a case challenging an anti-immigration law Florida lawmakers passed in early 2025.

Uthmeier was also at the dead center of the Hope Florida scandal — a scandal in which the DeSantis administration (led by then-DeSantis chief of staff James Uthmeier) appears to have taken $10 million from a Medicaid settlement and turned into it into money for campaign ads (using a political committee chaired by James Uthmeier).

A grand jury investigated the scheme and has presumably issued a report on its findings. But somebody seems to be fighting to keep that report secret. Uthmeier has repeatedly refused to say whether that somebody is him.

And, look, even if Uthmeier did break the law by failing to create a paper trail, I get that this is a bit like catching a mob boss on mail fraud.

But it’s also emblematic of the way that this guy has, I would argue, abused the powers of attorney general unlike any of his predecessors — Republican or Democrat.

In the roughly 14 months since Ron DeSantis appointed him to the position, Uthmeier has, for example, used his office to help elite special interests like car dealers and a Tallahassee lobbying firm run by one of the biggest political fundraisers in Florida.

At the same time, he has exploited the case of a teenage girl seeking an abortion after an unplanned pregnancy and tried to weaken state gun-safety laws.

And amidst it all, he has awarded lucrative legal contracts to friends and supporters — some paying nearly $900 an hour or promising as much as $50 million in contingency fees — while taking a $100,000-a-year part-time teaching gig for himself.

But perhaps a backlash is building.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the subject of the case in which a federal judge held James Uthmeier in contempt of court. The case involved a legal challenge to Senate Bill 4-C, an anti-immigration law passed by the Florida Legislature in early 2025.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

Thank you for this. It validates my opinion that we need to elect Jose Javier Rodriguez to be AG to actually take the office back to its intention of serving the public not the powerful.

S Russell

Great reporting as always!

I think the better question though, might be what laws has our unelected AG NOT broken? Or...... does our unelected AG even have the slightest understanding of what a law is, or how they're intended to be enforced?

Whatever law school issued him his law degree, I hope they're real proud of the giant stain on their reputation that is this current Attorney General. Of course, Harvard gave Desantis his law degree, so they deserve to be shamed for that embarrassment as well....

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Did Florida's attorney general break the law during a Martin Luther King Day legal stunt?

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

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