Florida Supreme Court Justice Meredith Sasso, 41, appointed last year after two previous applications to the court, is up for a yes-no retention vote on Nov. 5.

New justices serve at least a year and then voters decide in the next general election whether they should stay in the position. Retained justices then serve a six-year term. The Supreme Court’s seven justices each earn $258,957 annually.

Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Sasso through a process known as “assisted appointment,” in which the governor picked her from a list submitted by a state judicial nominating committee. Sasso replaced Justice Ricky Polston, who left the court to become general counsel to Citizens Property Insurance, the insurer of last resort for homeowners.

A conservative Republican who’s a member of the Federalist Society and the American Enterprise Institute Leadership Network, Sasso’s appointment shifted the high court further to the right. She is the third woman on the court — along with Renatha Francis, who is also up for a retention vote, and Jamie Grosshans — and the seventh justice appointed by a Republican governor.

Where she comes from

Sasso is a first-generation Cuban-American. Her father’s parents came to the U.S. in 1953 “at the tail end of the [dictator Fulgencio] Batista regime, seeking the liberty enjoyed by United States citizens,” she wrote in her application to the Fifth District Court of Appeal. She wrote that her mother’s family can trace their ancestry back to veterans of the Revolutionary War.

In 2019, Sasso began serving on the Fifth District Court of Appeal. When the appellate districts were reorganized and the new Sixth District Court added in 2023, she was assigned to it, briefly serving as its chief judge before being appointed to the high court.

Prior to becoming a judge, Sasso worked as a civil litigator, primarily representing government and business entities such as banks in foreclosure claims, the government in workers’ compensation and liability claims and manufacturers and general contractors in construction claims.

In 2016, she joined then-Gov. Rick Scott’s legal team, eventually becoming chief deputy general counsel. She described Scott as a “textbook public servant” and her time there influenced her judicial philosophy. In her applications to the Fifth District Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, she noted that the experience made her “ever mindful of my limited role and of the essential deference to the people’s democratically-elected [sic] representatives” and that “appropriate deference” is “essential for the people’s chosen representatives to operate.”

Judicial POV

When the state Supreme Court approved Amendment 3 (legalizing recreational marijuana) and Amendment 4 (limiting government interference with abortion) to be included on the Nov. 5 ballot for voters to decide, Sasso wrote dissenting opinions against both measures.

She said the premise of Amendment 3 was false because allowing adults to use marijuana is still illegal under federal law and “a state law has no power to authorize its residents to participate in conduct that would constitute a federal crime.”

On Amendment 4, Sasso disagreed with the majority opinion to put the abortion access measure to voters, stating that she found the amendment language “overwhelmingly vague and ambiguous.”

However, when the Court issued its majority opinion allowing Amendment 4 to be included on the ballot,, it stated that the measure “informs voters in clear, unambiguous language of the chief purpose of the amendment and … [is] not misleading.”

The majority opinion added, “We also recognize voters may be presumed to have the ability to reason and draw logical conclusions from the information they are given.”