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 2000 / Active

Thomas Sawaya

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Thomas Sawaya is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, serving since 2000. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2000 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

Stetson University

Judicial Record

In our data, Sawaya authored 386 published opinions for the court (2000–2018), plus 14 dissents and 13 concurrences. Most cited: Krol v. City of Orlando (62 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. 150 of these were attributed to Sawaya 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
2001	Krol v. City of Orlando	778 So. 2d 490	62
2000	Westerheide v. State	767 So. 2d 637	54
2001	Fox v. Professional Wrecker Operators of Florida, Inc.	801 So. 2d 175	51
2006	Richardson v. State	918 So. 2d 999	50
2007	Re-Employment Services, Ltd. v. NLAC	969 So. 2d 467	48
2005	Estate of Despain v. Avante Group, Inc.	900 So. 2d 637	47
2005	A.P.R. v. State†	894 So. 2d 282	46
2002	Yardley v. Albu	826 So. 2d 467	41
2005	Aaron v. Palatka Mall, LLC	908 So. 2d 574	38
2001	State v. Kindle	782 So. 2d 971	37
2001	McMaster v. State	780 So. 2d 1026	36
2002	Gross v. Department of Health	819 So. 2d 997	35
2003	State v. Gerry	855 So. 2d 157	33
2006	Molina v. State	946 So. 2d 1103	32
2002	Young v. State	803 So. 2d 880	32

Showing the 15 most-cited of 413 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 is Thomas Sawaya on?: Thomas Sawaya is 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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26 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).