He fulfilled his military obligation as a lieutenant in the United States Army from 1961 until 1963, stationed on a Nike Site in Denbigh, Virginia, being discharged as a captain in the reserves in 1965.

Anderson was nominated by President Jimmy Carter on April 18, 1979, to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, to a new seat authorized by 92 Stat.

[1] Anderson was reassigned by operation of law on October 1, 1981, to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, to a new seat authorized by 94 Stat.

[1] In July 2008, Anderson told President George W. Bush of his intention to assume senior status effective January 31, 2009.

Anderson told a local newspaper that he still planned to work "almost full-time" but that he hoped to take more vacation time—probably four to six weeks a year—to visit grandchildren in New York and Connecticut.

[1] In 1986, Anderson became the subject of an impeachment drive after a three-judge panel on which he sat ordered retrials for several convicted murderers because, they ruled, pretrial publicity had unfairly tainted their trials.

[4] In 2008, Anderson described himself as a judicial "moderate," and added that he "would like to be thought of as a judge who had no particular agenda and who took each case on the facts and applied the law that the Supreme Court laid down," regardless of his own personal view on it.