Judge's passion is making adoptions happen: Gooding helped whittle down 414 kids available for adoption last year to 258.

When David Gooding was a boy, he heard his father on the phone with law enforcement officers, saying, Well, bring them to our house."

This was back in the '50s and '60s when Marion Gooding was Duval County's only juvenile court judge, and there was a delinquency shelter for kids who broke the law, but no place for abused and neglected children picked up in emergencies on the weekend.

The youngest of six children would gladly share hand-me-down clothes and toys and build forts out of blankets draped over card tables with his sleepover buddies. Spared the details of their ravaged lives, little David Gooding just thought it was fun to have extra playmates for the weekend.

Now that he is a Fourth Judicial Circuit judge handling dependency cases, David Gooding knows all too well about crack babies and splintered bones and broken homes, and all the tragic details that lead to severing parental rights.

A year ago, more than 400 children in the Jacksonville area continued to languish in foster care, even though they were available for adoption. Judge Gooding vowed to do something about it.

The end result is that adoptions have nearly tripled, thanks to a collaborative effort between judges, the Guardian ad Litem's Permanency Project that recruited 38 pro bono attorneys, and social service agencies sharpening the focus on finding kids those "forever families."

"We have changed the culture of complacency," Judge Gooding said.

As a judge, he says there is no more significant order than a final order of adoption, and he sees his mission as "dealing with matters of eternal consequence."

"The government is a poor substitute for a parent. Children need loving, permanent families. Children need arms to hold them, ears to listen to them, and hearts to love them," Gooding said.

Red Tape Shredding Judge

When Judge Gooding explains how he helped whittle down 414 children available for adoption in March 2005, to 258 by the end of the year--including a whopping 52 adoptions in a single December day called "Family First Fridays"--he says it was "basically through good old-fashioned case management."

In short, Judge Gooding has mastered the art of cutting through red tape by holding people accountable and going straight to the person who can take care of business, rather than allowing cases to languish in the limbo of bureaucratic process.

If the adoptive parent hasn't finished the application paperwork and background information, he summons both the caseworker...