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 1977 / Served to 1998

Paul Danahy

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Paul Danahy was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1977–1998 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Danahy authored 665 published opinions for the court (1976–2008), plus 3 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Hetland (92 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. 308 of these were attributed to Danahy 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
1979	State v. Hetland	366 So. 2d 831	92
1979	Coxon v. State	365 So. 2d 1067	64
1978	Town of Longboat Key v. Carl E. Widell & Son	362 So. 2d 719	44
1986	Pearlstein v. Malunney	500 So. 2d 585	41
1987	Lomont v. State	506 So. 2d 1141	40
1978	Chaudoin v. State	362 So. 2d 398	40
1986	Bowman v. State	495 So. 2d 868	36
1979	Ray v. Pentlicki	375 So. 2d 875	36
1979	Fouts v. State	374 So. 2d 22	36
2002	Chicago Title Ins. Co. v. Alday-Donalson Title Co. of Fla., Inc.	832 So. 2d 810	34
1994	McIlveen v. McIlveen	644 So. 2d 612	34
1995	Woodson v. Martin	663 So. 2d 1327	33
1984	Jordan v. State	460 So. 2d 477	33
1979	Desilets v. Desilets	377 So. 2d 761	33
1980	Fox v. Haislett	388 So. 2d 1261	32

Showing the 15 most-cited of 674 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 Paul Danahy on?: Paul Danahy 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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21 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).