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 2003 / Active

Craig Villanti

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Craig Villanti is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, serving since 2003. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2003 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

Stetson University

Judicial Record

In our data, Villanti authored 549 published opinions for the court (2001–2019), plus 5 dissents and 35 concurrences. Most cited: Coughlin v. State (79 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. 339 of these were attributed to Villanti 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
2006	Coughlin v. State	932 So. 2d 1224	79
2004	Publix Super Markets v. Wilder Corp. of De	876 So. 2d 652	44
2010	BAC Funding Consortium Inc. ISAOA/ATIMA v. Jean-Jacques	28 So. 3d 936	39
2005	Johnson v. State	929 So. 2d 4	34
2011	Lee v. State	67 So. 3d 1199	33
2016	National Auto Service Centers, Inc. v. F/R 550, LLC· Concurrence†	192 So. 3d 498	28
2014	Toye v. State· Concurrence†	133 So. 3d 540	28
2011	Bryson v. Branch Banking and Trust Co.	75 So. 3d 783	28
2010	Stalley v. Transitional Hospitals Corp. of Tampa	44 So. 3d 627	28
2009	Zeigler v. State	18 So. 3d 1239	28
2008	CAREY-ALL TRANSPORT, INC. v. Newby	989 So. 2d 1201	28
2008	T.H. v. Department of Children & Family Services†	979 So. 2d 1075	28
2004	Baratta v. VALLEY OAK HOMEOWNERS'ASS'N	891 So. 2d 1063	28
2009	Masaka v. State	4 So. 3d 1274	27
2013	Sas v. Federal National Mortgage Ass'n†	112 So. 3d 778	26

Showing the 15 most-cited of 589 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 Craig Villanti on?: Craig Villanti is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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23 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).