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 1979 / Served to 1999

Joseph Nesbitt

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Joseph Nesbitt was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1930–2006
Tenure: 1979–1999 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

University of Florida
University of Miami

Judicial Record

In our data, Nesbitt authored 314 published opinions for the court (1973–2003), plus 16 dissents and 16 concurrences. Most cited: Public Health Trust v. Brown (49 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. 274 of these were attributed to Nesbitt 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
1980	Public Health Trust v. Brown	388 So. 2d 1084	49
1989	Hill v. Hill†	548 So. 2d 705	40
1984	A.A. v. State†	461 So. 2d 165	38
1982	Bystrom v. Equitable Life Assurance Society of United States†	416 So. 2d 1133	31
1979	Barreiro v. Barreiro	377 So. 2d 999	28
1998	Middleton v. State	721 So. 2d 792	25
1976	MANUFACTURERS'LEAS., LTD. v. Florida Dev. & Att., Inc.	330 So. 2d 171	25
1982	A. Y. G. v. State†	414 So. 2d 1158	24
1991	Castillo v. State	590 So. 2d 458	23
1980	E. Y. v. State†	390 So. 2d 776	23
1980	Barnes v. Ross	386 So. 2d 812	22
1980	Blatch v. State	389 So. 2d 669	21
1983	State v. G.P.†	429 So. 2d 786	20
1987	Crocker Investments, Inc. v. Statesman Life Insurance Co.· Dissent†	515 So. 2d 1305	18
1984	Davies v. Bossert	449 So. 2d 418	18

Showing the 15 most-cited of 346 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 Joseph Nesbitt on?: Joseph Nesbitt 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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20 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).