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 1946 / Served to 1949

Paul D. Barns

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

Paul D. Barns was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 1946. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1914 · age 112
Tenure: 1946–1949 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1946	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Barns authored 168 published opinions for the court (1928–1966), plus 50 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: Holland v. Gross (73 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. 2 of these were attributed to Barns 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
1956	Holland v. Gross	89 So. 2d 255	73
1949	Liquor Store v. Continental Distilling Corp.· Concurrence	40 So. 2d 371	62
1948	Star Fruit Co. v. Eagle Lake Growers, Inc.	33 So. 2d 858	62
1949	Petition of Florida State Bar Ass'n· Dissent	40 So. 2d 902	57
1947	Lynch v. Walker	31 So. 2d 268	49
1949	Florida State Racing Commission v. Bourquardez· Dissent	42 So. 2d 87	46
1954	Hull v. Maryland Casualty Company	79 So. 2d 517	38
1956	Reinhard v. Bliss	85 So. 2d 131	36
1946	Ball v. Yates	29 So. 2d 729	36
1954	Johnson v. Studstill	71 So. 2d 251	32
1955	Meadows v. Edwards	82 So. 2d 733	31
1948	Watson v. Claughton	34 So. 2d 243	31
1948	Gavagan v. Marshall	33 So. 2d 862	31
1964	Crownover v. Shannon	170 So. 2d 299	30
1949	City of Miami Beach v. First Trust Co.· Dissent	45 So. 2d 681	29

Showing the 15 most-cited of 241 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 Paul D. Barns on?: Paul D. Barns 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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3 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).