Never Contemplated: Surround Yourself with Amazing People
Bandy Rebecca
The latest edition of the “Never Contemplated” podcast features Bar Center for Professionalism Director Rebecca Bandy, a deeply committed and energetic lawyer who developed a thirst for justice while teaching in a rural Georgia high school.
Asked to define professionalism, Bandy quotes a short-hand version she learned while serving on an ABA committee.
“It’s what your mother and grandmama taught about how you should treat other people.”
Titled “Surround Yourself with Amazing People — Rebecca Bandy,” the episode is approved by The Florida Bar Continuing Legal Education Department for 0.5 hours of General CLE credit, and 0.5 hours of Professionalism Credit. Course No. 8231 is free and available here.
Recorded live at the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary Conference in Tampa, the episode turns its focus on the series producer, and gives veteran host Judge Hetal Desai an opportunity to promote it to hundreds of her colleagues.
Desai says she conceived “Never Contemplated” during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was following a true-crime podcast, and chairing a Standing Committee on Professionalism working group. Focusing its first episodes on women judges, the series was an immediate hit. Bandy estimates it has been downloaded more than 10,000 times.
Bandy credits Desai’s engaging personality, command of the subject matter, and talent for putting guests at ease.
“It’s not legalese, it’s conversational,” Bandy says. “She sounds like something right off of PBS.”
The series is devoted to gender equality and takes its name from an 1872 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that asserts the U.S. Constitution “never contemplated” women lawyers.
Bandy was born “Becky Jo” to teenaged parents in tiny Hilliard, a one stoplight-town between Jacksonville and the Georgia border. A legal career didn’t occur to her, mostly because of her family’s lack of means.
“I was very poor, but it didn’t matter, because most people in our town were poor. It was just limiting,” she said.
Despite lacking a college degree, Bandy’s mother stressed education. When Bandy was a toddler, her mother taught her the alphabet by making her trace the letters that would arrive regularly from a favorite aunt.
“My mom was 18, came from a poor family as well, but she made sure I could read by the time I was 3,” Bandy said. “There was never any question that I was going to college.”
Bandy earned good grades and adored her teachers and principals. Her school was small. She had 50 seniors in her graduating class, but the district was academically high performing.
Bandy’s family relied on public assistance, but she remembers feeling resentful only once — when her mother took a custodial job at her high school.
“There she was cleaning the bathrooms,” Bandy said. “I was mortified. Mortified. But do you know what she was doing? She was watching everything I did. She became friends with the principal.”
Bandy enrolled in Jacksonville University on a full scholarship and studied communications, broadcasting, public relations, and history with one goal in mind.
“I always dreamed of becoming a teacher,” she said. “I didn’t play Barbie. I was the kid who would line up her dolls and I’d be the teacher.”
The first in her family with a college degree, Bandy landed a job at a high school near Vidalia, Ga., between Macon and Savannah.
Bandy remembers the rural community fondly, but it was a culture shock. Poverty was so pervasive, “it made me feel wealthy.”
When her bosses learned she was a former cheerleader, they gave her a special assignment.
“They said you’re going to teach the football cheerleading squad,” she said. “That was great, until I learned there was a basketball cheerleading squad, and it was all black.”
Another regional tradition, separate black and white proms, troubled her deeply.
“You just had this segregation that was going on in public high school, it was terrifying,” she said. “This was a U.S. government school in 1999, 2000.”
Bandy shared her concerns with a local confidant who alerted the national media. A New York Times Magazine article, “A Prom Divided,” spurred the school to act, but it took years.
“That school did not integrate their proms until 2013,” Bandy said. “That really fired up my sense of justice, it just lit a fire in my soul for helping people, for serving people, and for making a difference in society.”
Bandy said her commitment only grew stronger after her younger brother, a U.S. Navy veteran, survived the October 12, 2000, terrorist attack on the destroyer U.S.S. Cole.
Encouraged by a lawyer boyfriend, she applied to several law schools and vowed to attend the first that admitted her. She graduated from FSU College of Law in 2015.
Bandy practiced criminal and family law for several years before joining the Bar’s Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism.
“We promote professionalism in the state of Florida,” she said. “We are not the discipline arm, we are the preventative arm.”
Asked to expand on her definition of professionalism, Bandy mentions the Four C’s – “Character, Competence, Commitment, and Civility.”
Florida has local professionalism panels that can mentor problem attorneys before they get caught up in the disciplinary system, Bandy tells the audience.
But she acknowledges the challenge appears to be growing.
“Poorly researched pleadings, super-aggressive, ugly emails, talking ugly to each other in court,” Bandy says. “It sounds like I’m talking to my preschool kids, but these are adults.”
Maintaining high professional standards is its own reward, Bandy said.
“When you have that bad day, if you’ve consistently shown that you have integrity and professionalism, you know what? That bad day is going to be forgotten.”
