Remembering Parker Thomson

Memories 1 Minute

One of my earliest legal mentors was Miami’s famed First Amendment lawyer Parker Thomson, who died last November. In 1986, I was fortunate to spend my last summer of law school working for his boutique media firm, then called Thomson Zeder.

One case I helped research involved a subpoena that actor Don Johnson had obtained against the Miami Herald. It came after secrets of one of Johnson’s Dade County real estate deals leaked to the newspaper.

Johnson wanted to know how the Herald’s reporter found out about a luxury home he was buying using intermediaries and straw men to conceal his identity.

The Thomson law firm destroyed Don Johnson’s lawyers in a matter of minutes. It “quashed” or wiped away the subpoena — and then persuaded the judge to make Don Johnson pay the Herald’s legal expenses over his flimsy case. The reporter never had to reveal a thing.

Afterward, I sometimes told friends that we litigated toe-to-toe with the Miami Vice. — And we won.

I felt tremendous pleasure and pride today as I sat on a committee of The Florida Bar that concluded the details for renaming a 60-year-old journalism award after Mr. Thomson. The Florida Bar Media Awards now will become the annual Parker Thomson Awards for Outstanding Legal Journalism in Florida.

This is a much deserved honor for a pioneering Florida media lawyer. He is listed as counsel on some of the biggest media law decisions of the 1970s. The most significant was called Miami Herald v. Tornillo, which overturned a Florida law requiring newspapers to publish rebuttals of their political endorsements.

Mr. Thomson went on to become a Miami civic leader and patron of the South Florida arts community that was flowering in Miami in the 1980s. Another one of my projects that summer was working with a team to help lay the legal groundwork for the start of the Miami City Ballet, another of his passions.

I am so proud to say he was my mentor. And I am grateful for the small role I played in renaming this major journalism award after him. Rest in peace eternal, Mr. Thomson.

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Published by Robert Craig Waters

Robert Craig Waters is a Florida writer. After leaving journalism in the early 1980s, he worked as an attorney, communications director, and public spokesman for the Florida Supreme Court in Tallahassee for 35 years. He grew up on a family farm in Beulah, Florida, not far from the Alabama border, before attending Brown University in the 1970s. His mother's family traces its roots to Weaverville, North Carolina. His father's family is from the small village of Burnt Corn, Alabama, where Mr. Waters spent part of his childhood.

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