How do judges of the Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?

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

Florida District Courts of Appeal / Joined 1989 / Active

Charles M. Harris

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Charles M. Harris is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, serving since 1989. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1989 · 36 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1989	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

College of the Ozarks
University of Florida

Judicial Record

In our data, Harris authored 919 published opinions for the court (1959–2019), plus 45 dissents and 51 concurrences. Most cited: Hagen v. Aetna Cas. and Sur. Co. (70 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. 684 of these were attributed to Harris 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
1996	Hagen v. Aetna Cas. and Sur. Co.	675 So. 2d 963	70
2002	Hersey v. State	831 So. 2d 679	51
1994	Woodard v. Woodard	634 So. 2d 782	36
1990	Ritenour v. Unemployment Appeals Commission	570 So. 2d 1106	35
1991	Drumwright v. State	572 So. 2d 1029	33
1993	Jones v. State	619 So. 2d 418	32
1994	Thompson v. State	638 So. 2d 116	29
1996	State v. Baxley	684 So. 2d 831	28
1993	North American Van Lines v. Collyer	616 So. 2d 177	26
1990	State v. McAdams	559 So. 2d 601	26
1992	Allstate Ins. Co. v. Conde	595 So. 2d 1005	25
1990	Kowalski v. Boyles	557 So. 2d 885	22
1993	Montgomery v. State	615 So. 2d 226	20
1990	Davis v. State	560 So. 2d 1231	20
2008	Etheredge v. Walt Disney World Co.	999 So. 2d 669	19

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,019 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 Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Charles M. Harris on?: Charles M. Harris is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal.

Sources

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

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