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 1969 / Served to 1979

Alexander Harman

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Alexander Harman was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1969. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1921–1996
Tenure: 1969–1979 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1969	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

Washington and Lee University

Judicial Record

In our data, Harman authored 163 published opinions for the court (1969–1979), plus 1 dissent and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Higginbotham v. Commonwealth (746 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. 92 of these were attributed to Harman 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
1975	Higginbotham v. Commonwealth†	216 Va. 349	746
1971	Smith v. Kauffman· Concurrence†	183 S.E.2d 190	123
1976	Oleyar v. Kerr, Trustee	217 Va. 88	113
1974	Gillis v. Commonwealth	215 Va. 298	109
1977	Clodfelter v. Commonwealth†	238 S.E.2d 820	104
1973	Lawhorne v. Harlan	214 Va. 405	91
1974	Paul v. Paul	214 Va. 651	73
1970	Beale v. Jones†	210 Va. 519	68
1979	Featherstone v. Brooks†	258 S.E.2d 513	65
1971	Cabbler v. Commonwealth	212 Va. 520	60
1971	Surratt, Adm'r v. Thompson· Concurrence†	212 Va. 191	57
1977	Burns v. Board of Sup'rs of Fairfax Cty.†	238 S.E.2d 823	55
1977	Saunders v. Commonwealth†	218 Va. 294	55
1976	Salina v. Commonwealth†	217 Va. 92	55
1978	Jordan v. Sauve†	247 S.E.2d 739	54

Showing the 15 most-cited of 166 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 Alexander Harman on?: Alexander Harman 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

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10 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).