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 1980 / Served to 1990

Ford L. Thompson

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Ford L. Thompson was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1980–1990 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Thompson authored 413 published opinions for the court (1980–1990), plus 11 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: M. J. v. State (41 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. 236 of these were attributed to Thompson 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
1981	M. J. v. State†	399 So. 2d 996	41
1981	Walter Glades Condominium v. Morris	393 So. 2d 664	41
1988	Aino's Custom Slip Covers v. DeLucia	533 So. 2d 862	32
1982	Monsanto Agr. Products Co. v. Edenfield	426 So. 2d 574	29
1981	TALLAHASSEE COCA COLA BOTLING v. Parramore	395 So. 2d 275	29
1981	Broward Indus. Plating, Inc. v. Weiby	394 So. 2d 1117	27
1982	Rhaney v. Dobbs House, Inc.	415 So. 2d 1277	25
1981	Lehigh Corp. v. Byrd	397 So. 2d 1202	25
1982	Lee v. Geiger	419 So. 2d 717	23
1987	Hartley v. Floyd	512 So. 2d 1022	21
1983	MOBIL CHEMICAL CO., a DIV. OF MOBIL CORP. v. Hawkins	440 So. 2d 378	20
1987	Garrette v. State	501 So. 2d 1376	18
1986	Odham v. Mouat	484 So. 2d 95	18
1984	Lepper v. State	451 So. 2d 1020	17
1981	Ship Shape v. Taylor	397 So. 2d 1199	17

Showing the 15 most-cited of 429 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 Ford L. Thompson on?: Ford L. Thompson 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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10 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).