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 2007 / Active

John W. Thornton Jr.

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

John W. Thornton Jr. is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, serving since 2007. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2007 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2007	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

University of Notre Dame
University of Miami

Judicial Record

In our data, Thornton authored 1 published opinion for the court (2011).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
2011	Jmc v. Vna	72 So. 3d 184	0

Showing the 1 most-cited of 1 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 is John W. Thornton Jr. on?: John W. Thornton Jr. is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal.

Sources

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

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19 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).