How do judges of the Supreme Court of Florida reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Florida / Joined 1938 / Served to 1969

Elwyn Thomas

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

Elwyn Thomas was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 1938. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1894–1971
Tenure: 1938–1969 · 31 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1938	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Education

Stetson University

Judicial Record

In our data, Thomas authored 872 published opinions for the court (1927–1968), plus 70 dissents and 31 concurrences. Most cited: Cloud v. Fallis (472 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. 263 of these were attributed to Thomas 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
1959	Cloud v. Fallis	110 So. 2d 669	472
1959	Slavin v. Kay	108 So. 2d 462	111
1941	The City of Miami Beach v. Ocean Inland Co.	3 So. 2d 364	102
1965	Walter v. Schuler	176 So. 2d 81	94
1956	Youngblood v. Taylor	89 So. 2d 503	90
1944	Gessner v. Del-Air Corporation	17 So. 2d 522	90
1963	Davis v. Shiappacossee	155 So. 2d 365	82
1939	State Ex Rel. Davis v. Parks· Dissent	194 So. 613	79
1960	Williams v. State	117 So. 2d 473	78
1949	Harmon v. Harmon	40 So. 2d 209	75
1954	Rigel v. National Casualty Company	76 So. 2d 285	72
1960	Sunad, Inc. v. City of Sarasota	122 So. 2d 611	70
1953	Carls Markets v. Meyer	69 So. 2d 789	68
1953	Collins v. State	65 So. 2d 61	67
1966	Tanenbaum v. Biscayne Osteopathic Hospital, Inc.	190 So. 2d 777	64

Showing the 15 most-cited of 991 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 Supreme Court of Florida reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Elwyn Thomas on?: Elwyn Thomas was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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31 years on the Supreme Court of Florida. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).