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 1990 / Served to 2009

Michael E. Allen

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Michael E. Allen was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1990. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1949 · age 77
Tenure: 1990–2009 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1990	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

Florida State University
Stetson University

Judicial Record

In our data, Allen authored 369 published opinions for the court (1990–2004), plus 5 dissents and 13 concurrences. Most cited: Nelson v. State (43 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. 199 of these were attributed to Allen 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
1998	Nelson v. State	719 So. 2d 1230	43
1994	Allerton v. State Dept. of Ins.	635 So. 2d 36	43
1997	Bard v. Wolson	687 So. 2d 254	41
1992	Holcomb v. Department of Corrections	609 So. 2d 751	35
2002	Brazeail v. State	821 So. 2d 364	32
1991	Perkins v. State	583 So. 2d 1103	31
1997	Middleton v. State	689 So. 2d 304	28
1997	K.Y.L. v. State†	685 So. 2d 1380	26
1991	Caron v. Systematic Air Services	576 So. 2d 372	26
1997	Sanders v. State	698 So. 2d 377	24
1996	Singletary v. Jones	681 So. 2d 836	23
2002	Wofford v. State	819 So. 2d 891	22
1995	Southern Bakeries v. Cooper	659 So. 2d 339	22
1992	Litvin v. ST. LUCIE CTY. SHERIFF'S DEPT.	599 So. 2d 1353	22
1992	Archer v. State	604 So. 2d 561	21

Showing the 15 most-cited of 388 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 Michael E. Allen on?: Michael E. Allen 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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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).