Before law school, Buddy Bardenwerper spent five years as a Coast Guard officer in the Caribbean. That experience became a novel — and a small body of published writing on the maritime border.
Buddy Bardenwerper served five years as a U.S. Coast Guard officer aboard the cutters Reliance and Joseph Tezanos, on law-enforcement and humanitarian missions that included the interdiction and repatriation of migrants at sea. He then earned a joint J.D. and M.P.P. from Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School, clerked for Justice John Couriel of the Florida Supreme Court and Judge Roy Altman of the Southern District of Florida, and joined the firm’s Miami office, where he handles complex civil litigation. In between, he wrote a novel.
Mona Passage (Syracuse University Press, December 2021) was published through the Press’s Veterans Writing Award series. It is set in San Juan, where two rooftop neighbors — Galán Betances, a Cuban émigré, and Pat McAllister, a young Coast Guard officer — become close friends. When Galán learns that his sister faces involuntary commitment in Cuba, he arranges her escape by sea across the Mona Passage, the strait between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Pat’s cutter patrols those waters. On a moonless night the two vessels converge, and Pat has to choose between his oath and his friend. Tobias Wolff called it “a suspenseful, humane novel.” It is also, unmistakably, a book written by someone who has stood on the deck of a cutter at night and understood exactly what the people in the small boat were risking.
Buddy has written about the same waters in nonfiction. His April 2022 essay for ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America, reflects on interdicting migrants from Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic — insisting that the people in those boats are ordinary people fleeing poverty and violence, and that a nation can enforce its maritime border lawfully and still treat them with dignity. And in November 2021 he published a two-part analysis for the Center for International Maritime Security on the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act: how the statute reaches foreign vessels on the high seas, the circuit split over whether a nexus to the United States is required, and the legal questions raised by prolonged at-sea detention of suspects.
The firm is glad to have a colleague who writes this well about subjects he knows this well. We hope to publish a conversation with Buddy about the book in a future post.
The novel: Mona Passage: A Novel — Syracuse University Press, Veterans Writing Award series, December 2021
Essay: From Harvard to the “Other” Border (and Back) — ReVista, Harvard Review of Latin America, April 21, 2022
Analysis: Pushing or Overstepping? Legal Boundaries in the Fight Against Maritime Drug Smuggling, Part 1 — CIMSEC, November 8, 2021 · Part 2, November 22, 2021
About Thomas (Buddy) Bardenwerper
Buddy Bardenwerper is an associate in the firm’s Miami office, where he represents clients in complex civil cases in state and federal courts. A former U.S. Coast Guard officer, he earned a joint J.D./M.P.P. from Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School and clerked for Justice John Couriel of the Florida Supreme Court and Judge Roy Altman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Publication spotlights summarize work our attorneys have published elsewhere; the views expressed in the original pieces are the authors’ own. Insights posts are offered for general information and are not legal advice.
