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 2001

David F. Patterson

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

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

Lived: 1939–2002
Tenure: 1989–2001 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

University of Florida
Stetson University

Judicial Record

In our data, Patterson authored 566 published opinions for the court (1958–2001), plus 6 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Thompson v. State (119 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. 346 of these were attributed to Patterson 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
1998	Thompson v. State	708 So. 2d 315	119
1991	Desmond v. State	576 So. 2d 743	65
1990	Arnold v. State	566 So. 2d 37	54
1991	Hapney v. Central Garage, Inc.	579 So. 2d 127	42
1991	Adams v. GD Searle & Co., Inc.	576 So. 2d 728	39
1990	Walker v. State	567 So. 2d 546	36
1991	Rogers v. State	586 So. 2d 1148	33
1994	Halkey-Roberts Corp. v. MacKal	641 So. 2d 445	31
1993	Luneke v. Becker†	621 So. 2d 744	27
1990	Payette v. Clark	559 So. 2d 630	27
1990	F.E.C. v. State†	559 So. 2d 413	26
1997	Johnson v. STATE HRS	695 So. 2d 927	22
1993	Dralus v. Dralus	627 So. 2d 505	22
1989	Zakak v. Broida and Napier, PA	545 So. 2d 380	20
1989	Solimando v. International Med. Centers	544 So. 2d 1031	20

Showing the 15 most-cited of 576 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 F. Patterson on?: David F. Patterson was 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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12 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).