How do judges of the Supreme Court of Florida reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Florida / Joined 1955 / Served to 1970

B Campbell Thornal

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

B Campbell Thornal was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 1955. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1908–1970
Tenure: 1955–1970 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1955	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Education

University of Florida

Judicial Record

In our data, Thornal authored 465 published opinions for the court (1955–1971), plus 24 dissents and 20 concurrences. Most cited: Williams v. State (1,148 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 196 of these were attributed to Thornal by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1959	Williams v. State	110 So. 2d 654	1,148
1968	Brown v. State	206 So. 2d 377	442
1957	De Groot v. Sheffield	95 So. 2d 912	362
1957	Hargrove v. Town of Cocoa Beach	96 So. 2d 130	285
1960	Brown v. State	124 So. 2d 481	212
1956	Davis v. State	90 So. 2d 629	171
1965	Harvey Building, Inc. v. Haley	175 So. 2d 780	121
1964	State v. Weeks	166 So. 2d 892	121
1958	Tampa Drug Company v. Wait	103 So. 2d 603	115
1965	Hedges v. State	172 So. 2d 824	109
1960	Nielsen v. City of Sarasota	117 So. 2d 731	107
1968	Arnold v. Shumpert	217 So. 2d 116	96
1961	Food Fair Stores, Inc. v. Trusell	131 So. 2d 730	96
1957	Gendzier v. Bielecki	97 So. 2d 604	94
1956	State v. Grayson	90 So. 2d 710	87

Showing the 15 most-cited of 513 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Supreme Court of Florida reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was B Campbell Thornal on?: B Campbell Thornal was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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15 years on the Supreme Court of Florida. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).