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 1994

Larry G. Smith

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

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

Tenure: 1979–1994 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

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

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 558 published opinions for the court (1984–1994), plus 9 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: Tallahassee Furniture Co., Inc. v. Harrison (61 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. 234 of these were attributed to Smith 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
1991	Tallahassee Furniture Co., Inc. v. Harrison	583 So. 2d 744	61
1984	Jackson v. State	454 So. 2d 691	57
1984	Garcia v. State	454 So. 2d 714	47
1984	Carney v. State	458 So. 2d 13	40
1990	Donald v. State	562 So. 2d 792	36
1985	Royal v. Parado	462 So. 2d 849	36
1984	Symons Corp. v. Tartan-Lavers Delray Beach	456 So. 2d 1254	33
1985	Thursby v. Reynolds Metals Co.	466 So. 2d 245	32
1984	McIntyre v. McIntyre	452 So. 2d 14	28
1993	Black v. State	630 So. 2d 609	27
1991	Akers v. Akers	582 So. 2d 1212	26
1989	In Interest of FR	539 So. 2d 588	26
1986	Salter v. State	500 So. 2d 184	26
1984	Pearson v. Harris	449 So. 2d 339	26
1992	Alachua County v. Cheshire	603 So. 2d 1334	25

Showing the 15 most-cited of 574 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 Larry G. Smith on?: Larry G. Smith was 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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15 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).