Bruce Robert Jacob (born March 26, 1935) is a former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Florida during the early 1960s.

The attorney representing the Petitioner, Clarence Gideon, was Abe Fortas, a Washington, D.C. lawyer who later became a Justice of the Supreme Court.

[2] The previous 1942 Supreme Court case of Betts v. Brady[3] required the appointment of counsel for an indigent defendant at state expense if there was a “special circumstance” present in the case which made it necessary for counsel to be provided for the defendant to receive a fair trial.

The decision in Gideon led to the establishment of many more public defender offices throughout the United States than had existed previously.

From 1965 to 1969 Jacob was an Assistant and associate professor at the Emory University School of Law, in Atlanta, Georgia.

[13] Jacob, who by then was in private practice in Bartow, Florida, volunteered and was appointed to represent defendants in criminal cases under this statute.

The program, providing free legal help to indigent prisoners at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta.

[15] The Supreme Court ruled with Jacob, who argued that his client had been subjected to an unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The National Defense Project, through Deputy Director John Cleary,[19] obtained the release of the two jailhouse lawyers and provided the funding to pay their salaries.

One of these men, Benjamin Rayborn,[20] later served for over 30 years as a highly respected paralegal at the office of the Federal Defender in San Diego, California.

While a graduate student at the Harvard Law School Jacob was the co-founder of the Prison Legal Assistance Project (P.L.A.P.

He was a member of The Constitution Project's "Blue Ribbon Panel" on indigent defense in the United States.

In 2009 the panel issued its report, entitled "Justice Denied: America's Continuing Neglect of Our Constitutional Right to Counsel."

They spend two years at Stetson, developing courses, teaching, and writing in preparation for a career as a law professor.

He gave the commencement speech address for the College of Law in May 2019, and received the honorary LL.D degree from Stetson University.

Here are some of his writings: In 1959 and 1960 Jacob spent six months on active duty in the U.S. Army at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina, for basic training, clerk-typist school, and work as a clerk typist and court reporter for special court-martial proceedings.