How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Court of Appeals of Tennessee / Joined 1982 / Served to 2014

Alan E. Highers

Judge, Court of Appeals of Tennessee

Alan E. Highers was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1982. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1982–2014 · 31 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Court of Appeals of Tennessee	–	–

Education

Lipscomb University

Judicial Record

In our data, Highers authored 1,068 published opinions for the court (1982–2014), plus 3 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: In re M.A.R. (541 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. 89 of these were attributed to Highers 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
2005	In re M.A.R.†	183 S.W.3d 652	541
2006	Newcomb v. Kohler Co.	222 S.W.3d 368	210
2006	Whalum v. Marshall	224 S.W.3d 169	137
1987	TSC Industries, Inc. v. Tomlin	743 S.W.2d 169	115
1999	Hoalcraft v. Smithson	19 S.W.3d 822	104
1993	Benson v. Tennessee Valley Electric Cooperative	868 S.W.2d 630	97
1992	McCarty v. McCarty	863 S.W.2d 716	92
1999	Goodman v. Goodman	8 S.W.3d 289	90
2006	BancorpSouth Bank, Inc. v. Hatchel	223 S.W.3d 223	84
1998	William Winchester v. Christy Little†	996 S.W.2d 818	76
1996	City State Bank v. Dean Witter Reynolds, Inc.	948 S.W.2d 729	72
2005	GSB Contractors, Inc. v. Hess	179 S.W.3d 535	69
2005	Cellco Partnership v. Shelby County	172 S.W.3d 574	67
1991	Elliot v. Elliot	825 S.W.2d 87	66
1997	Nickas v. Capadalis	954 S.W.2d 735	61

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,075 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 Court of Appeals of Tennessee reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Alan E. Highers on?: Alan E. Highers was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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