Spurious Legislation and Spurious Mandamus in Florida

The Florida Supreme Court has, in a number of recent cases, issued peremptory writs of mandamus directing the secretary of state to expunge designated wording from the official legislative record, of which he is the constitutional custodian. The author argues that these holdings constitute a clear abuse of this extraordinary writ, most recently as a mere pretext for bringing a constitutional challenge to the validity of a statute within the original jurisdiction of the supreme court. The author also proposes a conceptual framework for dealing with a material variation in wording between a bill as enacted by the legislature and the same bill as it is signed into law by the governor.