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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Supreme Court of Tennessee / Joined 1941 / Served to 1963

Alan M. Prewitt

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

Alan M. Prewitt was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1941. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1893 · age 133
Tenure: 1941–1963 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1941	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Prewitt authored 440 published opinions for the court (1937–1963), plus 7 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Turner v. Leathers (78 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. 240 of these were attributed to Prewitt 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
1950	Turner v. Leathers	232 S.W.2d 269	78
1955	Bland v. Smith	277 S.W.2d 377	76
1949	Cummings v. Beeler· Concurrence†	189 Tenn. 151	75
1948	Coffee v. State†	188 Tenn. 1	68
1963	County of Shelby v. City of Memphis	365 S.W.2d 291	66
1948	Knott v. Stewart County	207 S.W.2d 337	64
1944	Corlew v. State· Dissent	180 S.W.2d 900	60
1962	City of Nashville v. State Board of Equalization· Dissent†	360 S.W.2d 458	47
1948	Davis v. State†	186 Tenn. 545	45
1943	Law v. Louisville N.R. Co.	170 S.W.2d 360	43
1946	Bateman v. Smith	194 S.W.2d 336	41
1956	Bishop v. State	287 S.W.2d 49	40
1951	Brown v. Tennessee Auto Ins. Co.	237 S.W.2d 553	40
1946	Jared v. Fitzgerald	195 S.W.2d 1	40
1944	Cox v. State	181 S.W.2d 338	35

Showing the 15 most-cited of 452 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 Tennessee reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Alan M. Prewitt on?: Alan M. Prewitt was a Justice of the Supreme Court 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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21 years on the Supreme Court of Tennessee. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).