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 1995 / Served to 2004

James W. Whatley

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

James W. Whatley was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1995. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1947 · age 79
Tenure: 1995–2004 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Whatley authored 566 published opinions for the court (1995–2012), plus 2 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Barrios-Cruz v. State (68 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. 250 of these were attributed to Whatley 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
2011	Barrios-Cruz v. State	63 So. 3d 868	68
2000	Belmont v. Belmont	761 So. 2d 406	32
2008	Franke v. State	997 So. 2d 424	30
1997	Pearson v. State	686 So. 2d 721	28
1995	COOPER HOTEL SERV. INC. v. MacFarland	662 So. 2d 710	27
2000	Bloodworth v. State	769 So. 2d 1117	24
2001	Allstate Ins. Co. v. Materiale	787 So. 2d 173	22
1996	Narvaez v. State	674 So. 2d 868	21
2003	BILTMORE CONST. CO., INC. v. Owners Ins. Co.	842 So. 2d 947	20
1995	Livingston v. TUCKER CONST. & ENGINEER.	656 So. 2d 499	20
2010	Brown v. State	27 So. 3d 181	18
2005	Hilton v. State	901 So. 2d 155	18
2004	Department of Corrections v. Grubbs	884 So. 2d 1147	17
2005	Pate v. State	908 So. 2d 613	16
2007	Slack v. Kling	959 So. 2d 425	15

Showing the 15 most-cited of 569 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 W. Whatley on?: James W. Whatley 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

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9 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).