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 2001

James E. Joanos

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

James E. Joanos was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1980–2001 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

Florida State University
Yale University

Judicial Record

In our data, Joanos authored 956 published opinions for the court (1977–2000), plus 15 dissents and 11 concurrences. Most cited: McCurdy v. Collis (65 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. 445 of these were attributed to Joanos 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
1987	McCurdy v. Collis	508 So. 2d 380	65
1985	Taylor v. Kenco Chemical & Mfg. Corp.	465 So. 2d 581	47
1982	Linear Corp. v. Standard Hardware Co.	423 So. 2d 966	45
1994	Bradshaw v. State	638 So. 2d 1024	44
1987	DePoorter v. DePoorter	509 So. 2d 1141	42
1988	Griffin v. State	526 So. 2d 752	41
1994	Thomas v. State	634 So. 2d 175	39
1999	Marty v. Bainter	727 So. 2d 1124	38
1991	Johnson v. State	589 So. 2d 1370	34
1987	Ellsworth v. Ins. Co. of North America	508 So. 2d 395	34
2000	Chambers v. State	752 So. 2d 64	33
1992	Anderson v. State	592 So. 2d 1119	33
1989	Bingemann v. Bingemann	551 So. 2d 1228	33
1988	Smith v. State	525 So. 2d 477	32
1997	Long Term Managmt. v. Univ. Nursing Care	704 So. 2d 669	31

Showing the 15 most-cited of 987 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 James E. Joanos on?: James E. Joanos 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

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

21 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).