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 1985 / Served to 1999

Richard H. Frank

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Richard H. Frank was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1926–2012
Tenure: 1985–1999 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

Georgetown University
Georgetown University

Judicial Record

In our data, Frank authored 666 published opinions for the court (1985–1998), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: Ponton v. Scarfone (72 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. 356 of these were attributed to Frank 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
1985	Ponton v. Scarfone	468 So. 2d 1009	72
1990	Young v. State	566 So. 2d 69	31
1988	John Brown Automation, Inc. v. Nobles	537 So. 2d 614	31
1995	Burnette v. State	658 So. 2d 1170	28
1988	Smith v. State	532 So. 2d 50	24
1986	Rowe v. State	496 So. 2d 857	23
1985	Tindall v. Allstate Ins. Co.	472 So. 2d 1291	23
1989	State v. Sorakrai	543 So. 2d 294	22
1985	State v. Twelves	463 So. 2d 493	22
1985	Folwell v. BERNARD BY AND THROUUGH BERNARD	477 So. 2d 1060	21
1985	Sloan v. State	472 So. 2d 488	21
1987	Munroe v. State	514 So. 2d 397	19
1998	State v. Hernandez	706 So. 2d 66	18
1992	Dean v. FLORIDA UNEMP. APPEALS COMM'N	598 So. 2d 100	18
1989	PAC for Equality v. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, FLA. ELEC. COM'N	542 So. 2d 459	18

Showing the 15 most-cited of 667 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 Richard H. Frank on?: Richard H. Frank 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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14 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).