How do judges of the Supreme Court of Virginia reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Supreme Court of Virginia / Joined 1947 / Served to 1951

Abram Penn Staples

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Abram Penn Staples was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1947. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1885–1951
Tenure: 1947–1951 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1947	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

Washington and Lee University

Judicial Record

In our data, Staples authored 48 published opinions for the court (1947–1950), plus 6 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Mullen v. Mullen (81 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. 56 of these were attributed to Staples 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
1948	Mullen v. Mullen· Dissent†	188 Va. 259	81
1948	Walker v. Memorial Hospital†	187 Va. 5	45
1949	Travelers Health Ass'n v. Commonwealth†	188 Va. 877	39
1948	Penn v. Smyth†	188 Va. 367	36
1949	Brown v. Fox†	189 Va. 509	30
1948	Jernigan v. Capps· Dissent†	187 Va. 73	30
1950	Robinson v. Fidelity & Cas. Co. of NY†	190 Va. 368	29
1947	County of Norfolk v. City of Portsmouth†	186 Va. 1032	25
1949	Butler v. Commonwealth†	189 Va. 411	24
1948	Almond v. Gilmer· Dissent†	188 Va. 1	24
1950	Benson v. Commonwealth†	190 Va. 744	23
1949	Shockey v. Westcott†	189 Va. 381	22
1950	Floyd v. Miller· Dissent†	190 Va. 303	21
1949	Bland v. City of Richmond†	190 Va. 42	21
1948	City of Richmond v. Commonwealth†	188 Va. 600	20

Showing the 15 most-cited of 56 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 Virginia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was Abram Penn Staples on?: Abram Penn Staples was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

3 years on the Supreme Court of Virginia. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).