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 1971 / Served to 1975

Hal P. Dekle

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

Hal P. Dekle was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 1971. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1918–2005
Tenure: 1971–1975 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1971	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Education

Stetson University

Judicial Record

In our data, Dekle authored 157 published opinions for the court (1971–1975), plus 13 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Wood v. Camp (169 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. 59 of these were attributed to Dekle 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
1973	Wood v. Camp	284 So. 2d 691	169
1974	State v. Barber	301 So. 2d 7	144
1974	Sullivan v. State	303 So. 2d 632	139
1974	Lasky v. State Farm Insurance Company	296 So. 2d 9	139
1973	Troupe v. Rowe	283 So. 2d 857	123
1972	Donaldson v. Sack	265 So. 2d 499	98
1973	University Plaza Shopping Center, Inc. v. Stewart	272 So. 2d 507	87
1972	Belcher v. Belcher	271 So. 2d 7	80
1973	Ryan v. Ryan	277 So. 2d 266	69
1974	Moore v. Florida Parole and Probation Commission	289 So. 2d 719	67
1972	State v. Gustafson	258 So. 2d 1	66
1974	Chaffee v. Miami Transfer Company, Inc.	288 So. 2d 209	62
1974	Scholastic Systems, Inc. v. Leloup	307 So. 2d 166	61
1973	State v. Bryan	287 So. 2d 73	61
1972	Department of Administration v. Horne	269 So. 2d 659	58

Showing the 15 most-cited of 175 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 Hal P. Dekle on?: Hal P. Dekle 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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4 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).