Florida's public university system found a new way to reward political loyalty: install a lawyer sanctioned by a federal court as dean of a law school.

"It looks like politics has superseded merit."

— H.T. Smith, civil rights attorney and FIU Law search committee member

Florida International University named Daniel Epstein interim dean of its College of Law on July 28, 2026. Epstein is a Trump attorney who was sanctioned by a federal judge just days earlier for his role in a sham lawsuit the president brought against his own administration. The school's search committee did not rank Epstein among its top 20 candidates. The university's president and provost overruled them anyway.

This is not a story about a qualified person who happened to have political ties. It is a story about an academic institution that replaced its own merit-based selection process with loyalty-based appointment, and installed as the head of a law school someone who was formally disciplined for trying to manipulate the federal judiciary.

Epstein's legal troubles stem from Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of the president's tax returns from his first term. The case was widely understood as nonjusticiable: Trump controlled the executive branch, including the IRS, so there was no genuine adversarial dispute. But his attorneys filed it anyway, and the Justice Department quickly agreed to a "settlement" that would grant Trump and his family immunity from future tax audits while also creating a $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization fund" to compensate victims of government overreach, including January 6 defendants.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, a Barack Obama appointee, did not go along with it. In a 56-page ruling on July 13, she voided the settlement entirely, writing that it was "an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law."

Williams sanctioned the attorneys on both sides. Alejandro Brito, Trump's primary defamation lawyer, was referred to the Florida Bar. Daniel Epstein received a one-year ban on seeking pro hac vice admission in the Southern District of Florida, meaning he cannot even ask for permission to appear in court in the very district where he is about to run a law school.

Williams noted something telling about Epstein's conduct: he never applied to appear in the case, unlike other out-of-state attorneys who routinely seek such permission. "The Court can only surmise that Mr. Epstein was aware that he would never need to appear and litigate the merits of Plaintiffs' claims."

Translation: he signed a document that he knew was a fiction, and never intended to do the actual work of litigating it.

Epstein's background reads like a resume of conservative legal activism rather than academic leadership. He served as Senior Associate Counsel in the Trump White House during the first term, then became vice president of America First Legal, the litigation arm created by Stephen Miller. America First Legal is known for filing lawsuits demanding that schools, universities, and government agencies remove anything the organization considers ideologically objectionable, including a widely mocked campaign accusing Kellogg's of sexualizing children through Pop-Tart advertisements.

His higher education credentials are thin: a board seat at Palm Beach State College, an institution that U.S. News charitably describes as "unranked," and a few years teaching at St. Thomas University School of Law.

The search committee at FIU Law identified candidates who included a federal judge, a retired three-star vice admiral, multiple deans of other law schools, a general counsel for the U.S. Air Force, and an internal associate dean. Epstein was not among the top tier of any of these finalists. Committee member H.T. Smith said he did not even remember Epstein's name because the committee dismissed his application so quickly.

Provost Elizabeth Béjar later explained the rejection of the search results by saying the administration "hadn't articulated the appropriate vision moving forward for the College of Law." She did not specify what that vision was, though it apparently did not include qualifications, experience, or professional standing.

The person who made the final call was FIU President Jeannette Núñez, a former lieutenant governor under Ron DeSantis who has overseen a systematic transformation of Florida's higher education system into a vehicle for right-wing policy enforcement. Under her watch, New College of Florida, once considered the crown jewel of Florida public universities, was stripped of its distinctive curriculum, its endowment drained, and its identity erased. The state passed laws dictating what public institutions can teach about American history.

Epstein's cover letter for the FIU deanship, obtained by the Miami Herald, outlined a vision that fit this agenda perfectly. He argued that elite law schools are "scrambling" to look viewpoint-diverse but are "stuck with the faculty they have, who will block necessary reforms." He pitched FIU as the alternative: a school that would build ties with "the conservative parts of the country, intelligentsia, and federal government" to benefit students through clerkships and prestigious government placements.

This is a dean candidate whose stated vision for a law school includes purging faculty who resist ideological conformity. The message to students is clear: the law is a tool for enforcing political loyalty, not for pursuing justice.

Former FIU Law dean Len Strickman told the Herald that the university's decision raised a serious public relations problem. "Does the university want to present to the public a face of having its law school led by somebody who has been disciplined for unethical conduct?"

The irony is almost too deliberate to be accidental. FIU Law's previous dean was Alex Acosta, who resigned from Trump's cabinet when reporters asked about his role in the Jeffrey Epstein plea deal. The school's new dean is Daniel Epstein, sanctioned for unethical conduct in a Trump case. The school's namesake connection to ethical failure is now doubled, though in a completely different context.

Judge Williams's ruling did not prevent Epstein from serving as a dean. The sanctions she imposed are professional and jurisdictional, not criminal. They do not bar someone from administrative roles. But they do raise the question of what standard of ethical conduct a law school expects from the person charged with embodying it.

H.T. Smith put it more directly: "Central to the values of FIU is preparing law students to meet a high ethical and professional standard. Nothing could undermine these principles of ethics and professionalism than to have a poster boy for ethical corruption serving as the dean of the law school."

Florida's public universities were supposed to be engines of opportunity for students who could not afford private institutions. They are increasingly becoming extensions of a political project that views higher education as an adversary to be captured rather than a public good to be served.

The question is not whether this appointment violates any rules. The question is why anyone believes a law school should be led by someone whose first instinct as a lawyer was to use the courts to legitimize a deal that even the judge said had no basis in law.