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 / Served to 2011

David M. Gersten

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

David M. Gersten was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1989. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1989–2011 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

University of Florida
University of Florida

Judicial Record

In our data, Gersten authored 151 published opinions for the court (1989–2011), plus 21 dissents and 12 concurrences. Most cited: State v. S.M.F. (25 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. 128 of these were attributed to Gersten 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
1989	State v. S.M.F.†	546 So. 2d 20	25
2001	Penelas v. Arms Technology, Inc.	778 So. 2d 1042	22
2001	America Online, Inc. v. Booker	781 So. 2d 423	22
1993	Kaas v. Atlas Chemical Co.	623 So. 2d 525	22
1992	Puglia v. Puglia	600 So. 2d 484	21
1998	State v. Cortez	705 So. 2d 676	20
1998	Colon v. Outback Steakhouse of Florida	721 So. 2d 769	17
1992	Dominguez v. Barakat	609 So. 2d 664	16
1998	Perez v. Circuit City Stores, Inc.	721 So. 2d 409	15
1998	Thomas v. Perkins	723 So. 2d 293	15
1997	Escudero v. Hasbun	689 So. 2d 1144	15
2010	Park Adult Residential Facility, Inc. v. Dan Designs, Inc.†	36 So. 3d 811	14
1998	Izquierdo v. State	724 So. 2d 124	13
1994	Hernandez v. Hernandez	645 So. 2d 171	13
2001	Horn v. State	775 So. 2d 1007	11

Showing the 15 most-cited of 184 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 was David M. Gersten on?: David M. Gersten was 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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22 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).