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 2002 / Served to 2008

Raoul G. Cantero III

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

Raoul G. Cantero III was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 2002. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1960 · age 66
Tenure: 2002–2008 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2002	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cantero authored 57 published opinions for the court (2003–2008), plus 9 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Spera v. State (504 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. 13 of these were attributed to Cantero 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
2007	Spera v. State	971 So. 2d 754	504
2003	State v. McBride	848 So. 2d 287	335
2005	Taurus Holdings v. US Fidelity	913 So. 2d 528	280
2008	Jackson v. State	983 So. 2d 562	203
2003	F.B. v. State†	852 So. 2d 226	200
2007	State v. Hearns	961 So. 2d 211	186
2007	Carratelli v. State	961 So. 2d 312	165
2004	Indemnity Ins. Co. v. American Aviation· Concurrence†	891 So. 2d 532	138
2007	Brooks v. State	969 So. 2d 238	134
2004	St. Joe Corp. v. McIver	875 So. 2d 375	131
2008	Kasischke v. State	991 So. 2d 803	122
2006	State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co. v. Nichols	932 So. 2d 1067	120
2005	Harrell v. State	894 So. 2d 935	120
2007	Garcia v. Federal Ins. Co.	969 So. 2d 288	119
2004	Berges v. Infinity Ins. Co.· Dissent†	896 So. 2d 665	119

Showing the 15 most-cited of 68 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 Raoul G. Cantero III on?: Raoul G. Cantero III was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.

Sources

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

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6 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).