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 1974 / Served to 2000

Asbury Christian Compton

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Asbury Christian Compton was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1929–2006
Tenure: 1974–2000 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1974	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

Washington and Lee University
Washington and Lee University

Judicial Record

In our data, Compton authored 564 published opinions for the court (1974–2006), plus 97 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Bowman v. State Bank of Keysville (335 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. 348 of these were attributed to Compton 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
1985	Bowman v. State Bank of Keysville	331 S.E.2d 797	335
1993	CaterCorp, Inc. v. Catering Concepts, Inc.	431 S.E.2d 277	298
1991	Russo v. White	400 S.E.2d 160	284
1985	Chaves v. Johnson· Dissent†	335 S.E.2d 97	279
1977	Yarborough v. Commonwealth†	217 Va. 971	276
1997	Ward's Equipment, Inc. v. New Holland North America, Inc.	493 S.E.2d 516	251
1988	Fox v. Custis	372 S.E.2d 373	249
1990	Cheng v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	393 S.E.2d 599	243
1985	Gazette, Inc. v. Harris	325 S.E.2d 713	242
1989	Etheridge v. Medical Center Hospitals	376 S.E.2d 525	201
1983	Kamlar Corp. v. Haley· Dissent†	299 S.E.2d 514	200
1985	Brown v. Lukhard	330 S.E.2d 84	189
1989	County of Chesterfield v. Johnson	376 S.E.2d 73	178
1991	Weidman v. Babcock	400 S.E.2d 164	171
1992	Cable v. Commonwealth	415 S.E.2d 218	158

Showing the 15 most-cited of 669 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 Asbury Christian Compton on?: Asbury Christian Compton 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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25 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).