How do judges of the Supreme Court of Florida reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Florida / Joined 1979 / Served to 1994

Parker L. McDonald

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

Parker L. McDonald was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida (7 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1979. He previously served on the Florida District Courts of Appeal. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1924 · age 102
Tenure: 1979–1994 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

University of Florida
University of Florida

Judicial Record

In our data, McDonald authored 447 published opinions for the court (1964–1994), plus 12 dissents and 17 concurrences. Most cited: Holly v. Auld (735 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. 127 of these were attributed to McDonald 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
1984	Holly v. Auld	450 So. 2d 217	735
1984	State v. Neil	457 So. 2d 481	507
1981	Ray v. State†	403 So. 2d 956	256
1994	Kozel v. Ostendorf	629 So. 2d 817	243
1984	Gooding v. University Hosp. Bldg., Inc.	445 So. 2d 1015	243
1983	Palmer v. State	438 So. 2d 1	230
1983	Faison v. State	426 So. 2d 963	228
1993	Casa Clara Condo. Ass'n v. Charley Toppino and Sons, Inc.	620 So. 2d 1244	203
1983	Brown v. State	428 So. 2d 250	180
1991	State v. Beasley	580 So. 2d 139	167
1985	Robbie v. City of Miami	469 So. 2d 1384	163
1989	In re T.W.· Dissent†	551 So. 2d 1186	142
1988	Kehoe v. State	521 So. 2d 1094	133
1985	State v. Glosson	462 So. 2d 1082	132
1991	Martinez v. Scanlan	582 So. 2d 1167	131

Showing the 15 most-cited of 476 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 Supreme Court of Florida reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Parker L. McDonald on?: Parker L. McDonald was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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15 years on the Supreme Court of Florida. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).