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 1979 / Served to 1992

Douglass B. Shivers

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Douglass B. Shivers was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1979–1992 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

University of Florida

Judicial Record

In our data, Shivers authored 920 published opinions for the court (1979–1998), plus 15 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: Abruzzo v. Haller (69 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. 496 of these were attributed to Shivers 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
1992	Abruzzo v. Haller	603 So. 2d 1338	69
1987	Futch v. Head	511 So. 2d 314	47
1984	Swain v. State	455 So. 2d 533	44
1984	INTERN. HARVESTER CO. v. Mann	460 So. 2d 580	40
1983	Southern Crane Rentals, Inc. v. City of Gainesville	429 So. 2d 771	34
1982	Holley v. State	423 So. 2d 562	30
1982	McClain v. State	408 So. 2d 721	30
1980	Bennett v. Mattison	382 So. 2d 873	29
1986	White-Wilson Med. Ctr. v. Dayta Consultants	486 So. 2d 659	28
1982	Schreiner v. McKENZIE TANK LINES, ETC.	408 So. 2d 711	28
1996	Mangold v. Rainforest Golf Sports Center	675 So. 2d 639	27
1992	McKinney-Green, Inc. v. Davis	606 So. 2d 393	27
1984	Williams Roofing, Inc. v. Moore	447 So. 2d 968	27
1983	Poorman v. Muncy & Bartle Painting	433 So. 2d 1371	27
1987	Patterson v. State· Dissent†	512 So. 2d 1109	26

Showing the 15 most-cited of 941 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 Douglass B. Shivers on?: Douglass B. Shivers 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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13 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).