Senior Judge · Fourth Judicial Circuit Court
What applies in this courtroom
1,232 verified requirements govern practice before Judge Ronald P. Higbee across the judge, division, county, circuit, and statewide layers.
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No current assignment on record.
Judge Higbee received a Bachelor's of Science in Criminology cum laude in 1975 from Florida State University and a Juris Doctorate Degree from the University of Florida with honors in 1978. He was a member of the United States Navy serving in the Judge Advocate General's Corps both on active duty and in the Reserves attaining the rank of Lieutenant Commander before separation from the Reserves. He was an Assistant State Attorney in Jacksonville from 1984 until 1986 and served in the private sector from 1986 until 1988. He was an Assistant Public Defender from 1988 until 2002 where he served in the felony, special defense, and homicide divisions. In addition, he was a supervisor for three years of all the County Court attorneys for the Public Defender's Office. He was appointed by Governor Bush to fill a new County Court division and became a judge on January 2, 2002. In June 2002 he was appointed to the Criminal Procedure Rules Committee for the Florida Bar. Judge Higbee retired on June 30, 2021, and is now a senior judge.
Published by the Fourth Judicial Circuit Court on this judge's own profile page and reproduced verbatim — BenchPath does not write or paraphrase judicial biographies. Read it on the court's site →
Added 2026-07-25 from the circuit's own biographies page, which lists this officer as "Senior Judge – Ronald P. Higbee". BenchPath held no record for this senior judge before this pass.
Verified 2026-08-03: jud4.org publishes no judge portraits — the roster is a text table and the biographies page carries no judge photos. A court fact, not a harvest gap.
Captured verbatim from the court's own published pages and orders during circuit verification. Chambers practices change without notice — confirm anything time-critical with the judicial assistant. Procedural information only; not legal advice.
Appeals from this courtroom go to the Fifth District Court of Appeal (Daytona Beach).
● LiveThat court's published bench (11): Adrian G. Soud, Brian D. Lambert, Eric J. Eisnaugle, F. Rand Wallis, Harvey L. Jay, James A. Edwards, Joe Boatwright, John M. Harris, John MacIver, Paige Kilbane, Scott Makar
Jurisdiction per § 35.043, Fla. Stat. (six-district alignment eff. Jan. 1, 2023).
This tab lists judge-and-division rules only, and this judge's division publishes its practice at the county, circuit, and statewide layers instead — 1,232 verified requirements still govern this courtroom. The Full Premium Report assembles every one of them, cited.
See all 1,232 in the Full Premium Report →No judge-level deadline on record runs shorter than a statewide deadline with the same trigger. The sentinel compares quoted timing across every published rule scoped to this judge on each visit — a clean result today is re-earned tomorrow.
No judge-scoped deadlines on this tab. Deadlines are extracted only when the source rule text states them — we never infer or calculate dates the rule does not explicitly contain.
Timing shown here is quoted from the rule text. Compute your actual date against the court's calendar and the rule itself — not legal advice.
No verified ruling summary yet. BenchPath generates ruling summaries from opinion and docket corpora (CourtListener where covered) and publishes them only after human review — fabricated judicial analytics are exactly what this platform refuses to ship.
Use the live case-law search below to see what exists for this judge today.
Answer three quick questions. The platform pulls Ronald P. Higbee's full public case-law record from the source, newest first — your matter never narrows the pull; it directs the relevance ranking and the dual-AI analysis. Every hit comes back Bluebook-cited with the opinion's own words quoted verbatim. The scan takes the time precision takes.
Case-law search
CourtListener · free connector · liveCoverage note: CourtListener is strongest for federal courts and state appellate courts. Florida circuit-court opinions are sparsely represented — an absence of results is a coverage gap, not evidence about this judge.
No rule-level sources registered yet — judge-level provenance is listed in the Overview tab.
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No assignments on record.
No source changes detected for this judge yet — when the underlying court pages move, it shows up here first.