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 2003 / Served to 2012

Paul M. Hawkes

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Paul M. Hawkes was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 2003. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2003–2012 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

Florida State University

Judicial Record

In our data, Hawkes authored 196 published opinions for the court (2003–2011), plus 8 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: MH v. Department of Children and Families (53 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. 62 of these were attributed to Hawkes 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
2004	MH v. Department of Children and Families	866 So. 2d 220	53
2005	Shiver v. State	900 So. 2d 615	44
2006	Cox v. Crosby· Dissent†	27 So. 3d 45	32
2003	Florida Dept. of Educ. v. Cooper	858 So. 2d 394	27
2006	Notami Hosp. of Florida, Inc. v. Bowen	927 So. 2d 139	24
2004	Jacobsen v. Stores	882 So. 2d 431	24
2003	Safeharbor Employer Services I, Inc. v. Velazquez	860 So. 2d 984	23
2003	Miller v. Miller	842 So. 2d 168	23
2007	Mitchell v. XO COMMUNICATIONS	966 So. 2d 489	22
2004	JP Morgan Chase Bank v. Combee	883 So. 2d 330	22
2010	Fuller v. Truncale†	50 So. 3d 25	21
2005	Albritton v. Ferrera	913 So. 2d 5	21
2010	Croom v. State	36 So. 3d 707	20
2007	Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc. v. Reddick	954 So. 2d 723	20
2009	Johnson v. State	22 So. 3d 840	19

Showing the 15 most-cited of 208 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 M. Hawkes on?: Paul M. Hawkes 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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9 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).