Just what does it mean to be a friend on Facebook? According to Florida’s Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee, it’s a pretty serious relationship.

The panel has told lawyers and judges that they should no longer be Facebook friends, the New York Times’ John Schwartz reports.

Schwartz writes:

When judges “friend” lawyers who may appear before them, the committee said, it creates the appearance of a conflict of interest, since it “reasonably conveys to others the impression that these lawyer ‘friends’ are in a special position to influence the judge.”

In practice, of course, actual friends and Facebook friends can be as different as leather and pleather, and the committee did recognize that online friends were not the same as friends in the traditional sense. A minority of the panel would have allowed Facebook friendship, which it characterized as more like “a contact or acquaintance” without conveying the notion of “feelings of affection or personal regard.”

Schwartz reports this reaction:

Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University, said the Florida rule went too far. “In my view, they are being hypersensitive,” Professor Gillers said. He noted that the differences within the committee probably indicated a generational gap, which Judge Jones said was not the case. In the case of a truly close friendship between a judge and a lawyer involved in a case, the other side can simply seek to disqualify the judge, Professor Gillers said.

Judges do not “drop out of society when they become judges,” he said. “The people who were their friends before they went on the bench remained their friends, and many of them were lawyers.”