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

Chris W. Altenbernd

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Chris W. Altenbernd is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, serving since 1989. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1949 · age 77
Tenure: Since 1989 · 37 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

Harvard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Altenbernd authored 1,446 published opinions for the court (1989–2016), plus 16 dissents and 133 concurrences. Most cited: Reyes v. State (332 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. 781 of these were attributed to Altenbernd 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
1995	Reyes v. State	655 So. 2d 111	332
2009	Hughes v. State	22 So. 3d 132	284
1995	Parkway Bank v. FORT MYERS ARMATURE WORK	658 So. 2d 646	170
2000	Smith v. State	761 So. 2d 419	159
1992	Bourque v. State	595 So. 2d 222	67
2013	Focht v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.· Concurrence†	124 So. 3d 308	66
2002	Corzo v. State	806 So. 2d 642	66
2002	Board of Regents of State v. Snyder	826 So. 2d 382	61
2007	Valdez-Garcia v. State	965 So. 2d 318	54
1995	D.G. v. State†	661 So. 2d 75	47
1996	Hagan v. Sun Bank of Mid-Florida	666 So. 2d 580	46
1997	Stilson v. Allstate Ins. Co.	692 So. 2d 979	45
1997	Mitchell v. State	698 So. 2d 555	43
1996	Gibbs v. Gibbs	686 So. 2d 639	41
2003	Stacy David, Inc. v. Consuegra	845 So. 2d 303	40

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,597 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 Chris W. Altenbernd on?: Chris W. Altenbernd 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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37 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).