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 1974 / Served to 1999

Ben F. Overton

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

Ben F. Overton was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1926–2012
Tenure: 1974–1999 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1974	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Overton authored 814 published opinions for the court (1974–1999), plus 46 dissents and 22 concurrences. Most cited: Canakaris v. Canakaris (2,288 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. 344 of these were attributed to Overton 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
1980	Canakaris v. Canakaris	382 So. 2d 1197	2,288
1985	Florida Patient's Compensation Fund v. Rowe	472 So. 2d 1145	889
1979	Robinson v. State	373 So. 2d 898	654
1984	Jenkins v. State	444 So. 2d 947	460
1993	Hale v. State	630 So. 2d 521	430
1985	State v. Jackson	478 So. 2d 1054	337
1985	Trianon Park Condominium v. City of Hialeah	468 So. 2d 912	325
1985	Bowen v. Bowen	471 So. 2d 1274	319
1990	Standard Guar. Ins. Co. v. Quanstrom	555 So. 2d 828	287
1995	Davis v. State	661 So. 2d 1193	248
1993	State v. Johnson	616 So. 2d 1	239
1975	Williams v. State	316 So. 2d 267	239
1995	State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co. v. Laforet	658 So. 2d 55	201
1994	Alamo Rent-A-Car, Inc. v. Mancusi	632 So. 2d 1352	201
1981	Ensor v. State	403 So. 2d 349	198

Showing the 15 most-cited of 882 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 Ben F. Overton on?: Ben F. Overton was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.

Sources

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

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25 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).