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 1994 / Served to 2009

Harry Lee Anstead

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

Harry Lee Anstead was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida (7 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1994. He previously served on the Florida District Courts of Appeal. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1937 · age 89
Tenure: 1994–2009 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–
1994	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Education

University of Florida
University of Florida

Judicial Record

In our data, Anstead authored 468 published opinions for the court (1977–2009), plus 237 dissents and 237 concurrences. Most cited: Haines City Community Dev. v. Heggs (536 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. 621 of these were attributed to Anstead 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
1995	Haines City Community Dev. v. Heggs	658 So. 2d 523	536
1999	Seifert v. US Home Corp.	750 So. 2d 633	377
1996	Chicone v. State	684 So. 2d 736	155
1999	Moransais v. Heathman	744 So. 2d 973	149
2004	Berges v. Infinity Ins. Co.· Concurrence†	896 So. 2d 665	119
1995	De La Rosa v. Zequeira	659 So. 2d 239	109
1996	Kukral v. Mekras	679 So. 2d 278	103
1998	Brown v. State	719 So. 2d 882	100
2007	Williams v. Davis	974 So. 2d 1052	99
2000	Turner v. PCR, INC.	754 So. 2d 683	99
1996	Acosta v. Richter	671 So. 2d 149	98
1998	White v. State	714 So. 2d 440	97
1995	Department Hrs v. Bjm	656 So. 2d 906	89
1997	L.B. v. State· Concurrence†	700 So. 2d 370	88
2006	Scipio v. State	928 So. 2d 1138	86

Showing the 15 most-cited of 945 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 Harry Lee Anstead on?: Harry Lee Anstead was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.

Sources

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

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14 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).