Barbara Lagoa (2 November 1967-) was Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from 6 December 2019, succeeding Stanley Marcus.
Biography[]
Barbara Lagoa was born in Miami, Florida in 1967 to Cuban refugee parents, and she was raised in Hialeah. She became a lawyer, representing Elian Gonzalez's Miami family during their unsuccessful bid to keep him in the United States in a controversial 2000 court case. Governor Jeb Bush appointed her Judge of the Florida Third District Court of Appeal in 2006, and she served until 2019. She went on to become the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court of Florida in 2019, and, in 2019, Donald Trump appointed her a federal judge. In September 2020, Trump considered her as a replacement for the late US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.