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 1989 / Served to 2013

Mark Polen

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Mark Polen was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1989. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1989–2013 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1989	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Polen authored 1,074 published opinions for the court (1989–2013), plus 35 dissents and 47 concurrences. Most cited: Maestas v. State (257 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. 555 of these were attributed to Polen 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	Maestas v. State†	76 So. 3d 991	257
2005	Fonte v. AT&T Wireless Services, Inc.	903 So. 2d 1019	61
1992	Kelly v. State	593 So. 2d 1060	51
2004	Weinstein Design Group, Inc. v. Fielder	884 So. 2d 990	46
1990	Casella v. Casella	569 So. 2d 848	42
1990	Mettler v. Mettler	569 So. 2d 496	41
1999	Francis v. State	736 So. 2d 97	36
2008	JJK INTERNATIONAL, INC. v. Shivbaran	985 So. 2d 66	35
1999	Whelan v. Whelan	736 So. 2d 732	35
1996	North American Van Lines, Inc. v. Lexington Insurance Co.· Concurrence†	678 So. 2d 1325	34
1999	Greene v. Bursey	733 So. 2d 1111	31
1998	Rodriguez v. Campbell	720 So. 2d 266	30
1996	Town of Manalapan v. Rechler	674 So. 2d 789	30
1995	Bulkan v. FLA. UNEMPLOYMENT APPEALS	648 So. 2d 846	30
1990	Schmitt v. State	563 So. 2d 1095	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,159 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 Mark Polen on?: Mark Polen 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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24 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).