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 1946 / Served to 1969

Archibald C. Buchanan

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Archibald C. Buchanan was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1946. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1890–1979
Tenure: 1946–1969 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1946	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

Hampden-Sydney College
Washington and Lee University

Judicial Record

In our data, Buchanan authored 424 published opinions for the court (1905–1969), plus 32 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Bryant v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance (128 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. 385 of these were attributed to Buchanan 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
1965	Bryant v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance†	205 Va. 897	128
1968	Johnson v. Commonwealth	209 Va. 291	114
1960	Marshall v. Commonwealth†	202 Va. 217	99
1954	Banovitch v. Commonwealth†	196 Va. 210	92
1964	Pierce v. Commonwealth†	205 Va. 528	89
1962	W. F. Magann Corp. v. Virginia-Carolina Electrical Works, Inc.†	203 Va. 259	89
1951	Trimyer v. Norfolk Tallow Co.†	192 Va. 776	84
1947	Sykes v. Stone & Webster Engineering Corp.†	186 Va. 116	83
1954	Winston v. City of Richmond	196 Va. 403	79
1956	Raymond Thomas Council v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	198 Va. 288	77
1969	Barrett v. Commonwealth	210 Va. 153	76
1947	Humphreys v. Commonwealth†	186 Va. 765	70
1952	Dyke v. Commonwealth†	193 Va. 478	68
1966	Hawks v. DeHart†	206 Va. 810	67
1969	Burroughs v. Walmont, Inc.· Dissent†	210 Va. 98	62

Showing the 15 most-cited of 462 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 Archibald C. Buchanan on?: Archibald C. Buchanan 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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23 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).