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 1990 / Served to 2006

Earle Peterson Jr.

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Earle Peterson Jr. was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1990. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1935 · age 91
Tenure: 1990–2006 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1990	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

Florida State University
University of Florida

Judicial Record

In our data, Peterson authored 669 published opinions for the court (1990–2006), plus 9 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: Abbott Labs., Inc. v. General Elec. Capital (67 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. 332 of these were attributed to Peterson 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
2000	Abbott Labs., Inc. v. General Elec. Capital	765 So. 2d 737	67
2000	Smartt v. First Union National Bank	771 So. 2d 1232	61
2001	Barbour v. Brinker Florida, Inc.	801 So. 2d 953	58
1997	Fletcher v. State	699 So. 2d 346	37
1993	Silva v. Nightingale	619 So. 2d 4	32
2003	HP v. Department of Children and Families	838 So. 2d 583	31
2004	ENIC, PLC v. FF South & Company, Inc.	870 So. 2d 888	26
1993	Miller v. Miller	625 So. 2d 1320	26
1990	Oriental Imports, Inc. v. Alilin	559 So. 2d 442	26
1995	Pascarelli v. UNEMPLOYMENT APPEALS COM'N	664 So. 2d 1089	25
1993	Crosby Forrest Products, Inc. v. Byers	623 So. 2d 565	25
2000	O'Leary v. Fla. Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association	757 So. 2d 624	24
1998	Floyd v. Federal Nat. Mortg. Ass'n	704 So. 2d 1110	24
2000	Lewis v. State	751 So. 2d 715	23
1996	Vaccaro v. Vaccaro	677 So. 2d 918	22

Showing the 15 most-cited of 689 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 Earle Peterson Jr. on?: Earle Peterson Jr. 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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16 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).