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 1978 / Served to 1985

James E. Alderman

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

James E. Alderman was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 1978. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1936–1995
Tenure: 1978–1985 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1978	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Alderman authored 202 published opinions for the court (1975–1985), plus 15 dissents and 18 concurrences. Most cited: Clark v. State (315 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. 63 of these were attributed to Alderman 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
1978	Clark v. State	363 So. 2d 331	315
1982	City of Deerfield Beach v. Vaillant	419 So. 2d 624	277
1981	State v. Webb	398 So. 2d 820	258
1981	Ray v. State· Concurrence†	403 So. 2d 956	256
1979	Houdaille Industries, Inc. v. Edwards	374 So. 2d 490	193
1980	Eutsey v. State	383 So. 2d 219	180
1980	Shevin v. Byron, Harless, Schaffer, Reid & Associates, Inc.	379 So. 2d 633	162
1981	Mercury Motors Exp., Inc. v. Smith	393 So. 2d 545	150
1979	Hallman v. State	371 So. 2d 482	137
1979	Wait v. Florida Power & Light Co.	372 So. 2d 420	135
1980	Besett v. Basnett	389 So. 2d 995	131
1981	In re Trial Courts of the Standard Jury Instructions in Criminal Cases· Concurrence†	431 So. 2d 594	130
1982	Rose v. State	425 So. 2d 521	121
1979	State v. Pinder	375 So. 2d 836	109
1985	Pullum v. Cincinnati, Inc.	476 So. 2d 657	107

Showing the 15 most-cited of 235 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 James E. Alderman on?: James E. Alderman 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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7 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).