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 1977 / Served to 1978

Frederick B. Karl

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

Frederick B. Karl was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1924–2013
Tenure: 1977–1978 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Education

Stetson University

Judicial Record

In our data, Karl authored 45 published opinions for the court (1977–1978), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: English v. McCrary (247 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. 9 of these were attributed to Karl 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
1977	English v. McCrary	348 So. 2d 293	247
1978	McNamara v. State	357 So. 2d 410	207
1977	National U. Fire Ins. Co. v. Lenox Liquors, Inc.	358 So. 2d 533	122
1977	State v. Wershow	343 So. 2d 605	76
1977	Sullivan v. Askew	348 So. 2d 312	56
1978	Griffis v. State	356 So. 2d 297	52
1977	State v. Gale Distributors, Inc.	349 So. 2d 150	51
1977	State v. Winters	346 So. 2d 991	47
1977	Shor v. Paoli	353 So. 2d 825	39
1977	State v. Basiliere	353 So. 2d 820	37
1978	Murphy v. MacK	358 So. 2d 822	31
1977	State v. Bassham	352 So. 2d 55	25
1978	State v. Gaylord	356 So. 2d 313	23
1978	State v. Munford	357 So. 2d 706	21
1977	Fla. Admin. Com'n v. Dist. Court of Appeal	351 So. 2d 712	19

Showing the 15 most-cited of 46 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 Frederick B. Karl on?: Frederick B. Karl 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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1 year 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).