Cuban lawyers program defended.

The Florida Supreme Court's 1973 Cuban-exile admission decision, like most remedies for difficult legal issues, provided an option that balanced an urgent need for legal services against the court's responsibility to protect the public.

Celebrating the anniversary of the programs created to implement that decision was both appropriate and long overdue. Unlike current or other mass refugee scenarios, the court noted that in 1973 there were over 300,000 Cuban refugees in Florida, with only 40 Bar members who spoke Spanish. For Cubanexile lawyers who were required to surrender their assets before leaving their homeland, the option of becoming full-time law students, to obtain a J.D. from a common law law school, was an economic impossibility.

Faced with a massive urgent need for bi-lingual lawyers and a resource of Cuban lawyers with decades of Cuban civil law experience, the...