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 1936 / Served to 1967

Claude V. Spratley

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Claude V. Spratley was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1936. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1882–1976
Tenure: 1936–1967 · 31 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1936	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

College of William and Mary
University of Virginia-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Spratley authored 551 published opinions for the court (1936–1967), plus 40 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Dawkins v. Commonwealth (132 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. 558 of these were attributed to Spratley 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
1947	Dawkins v. Commonwealth†	186 Va. 55	132
1967	Giant of Virginia, Inc. v. Pigg†	207 Va. 679	116
1938	Bell v. Commonwealth†	170 Va. 597	103
1941	Burlington Mills Corp. v. Hagood†	177 Va. 204	90
1960	Baker v. Marcus†	201 Va. 905	88
1949	Toler v. Commonwealth†	188 Va. 774	88
1961	Smithey v. Sinclair Refining Co.· Dissent†	203 Va. 142	83
1948	Mullen v. Mullen†	188 Va. 259	81
1946	Street v. Consumers Mining Corp.†	185 Va. 561	80
1937	Burch v. Grace Street Building Corp.†	168 Va. 329	80
1939	Ayres v. Harleysville Mutual Casualty Co.· Dissent†	172 Va. 383	77
1937	Ferguson v. Ferguson†	169 Va. 77	72
1951	Fauver v. Bell†	192 Va. 518	70
1952	Dyke v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	193 Va. 478	68
1943	Jefferson Standard Life Insurance v. Hedrick†	181 Va. 824	67

Showing the 15 most-cited of 600 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 Claude V. Spratley on?: Claude V. Spratley 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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31 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).