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 1923 / Served to 1964

William G. Terrell

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

William G. Terrell was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 1923. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1877–1964
Tenure: 1923–1964 · 40 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1923	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Education

Samford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Terrell authored 1,743 published opinions for the court (1923–1964), plus 62 dissents and 24 concurrences. Most cited: Quinn v. Phipps (245 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. 320 of these were attributed to Terrell 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
1927	Quinn v. Phipps	113 So. 419	245
1925	Jones Trustee Etc. v. Carpenter	106 So. 127	171
1964	Benefield v. State	160 So. 2d 706	160
1930	Amos v. Mathews· Separate	126 So. 308	151
1937	Yates v. Ball	181 So. 341	112
1925	Nickels v. State· Separate	106 So. 479	106
1936	Twyman v. Roell	166 So. 215	97
1947	Brill v. State	32 So. 2d 607	96
1964	Shaw v. Puleo	159 So. 2d 641	91
1958	Larry v. State	104 So. 2d 352	89
1939	State Ex Rel. Davis v. Parks	194 So. 613	79
1941	Strauss v. Strauss	3 So. 2d 727	74
1946	Ready v. Safeway Rock Company	24 So. 2d 808	73
1954	Mallory v. O'NEIL	69 So. 2d 313	72
1941	State Road Department v. Tharp	1 So. 2d 868	72

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,867 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 William G. Terrell on?: William G. Terrell 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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40 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).