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 1997 / Former Justice

Cynthia D. Kinser

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Cynthia D. Kinser was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1951 · age 75
Tenure: 1997 · 29 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

University of Virginia-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Kinser authored 220 published opinions for the court (1997–2012), plus 13 dissents and 22 concurrences. Most cited: Riner v. Com. (401 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. 62 of these were attributed to Kinser 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
2004	Riner v. Com.	601 S.E.2d 555	401
2005	Muhammad v. Com.· Concurrence†	611 S.E.2d 537	379
2009	Grattan v. Com.	685 S.E.2d 634	314
2008	Jay v. Com.	659 S.E.2d 311	292
1998	Richmond Metropolitan Authority v. McDevitt Street Bovis, Inc.	507 S.E.2d 344	254
2004	Jackson v. Commonwealth	594 S.E.2d 595	238
2011	Com. v. McNeal	710 S.E.2d 733	186
2005	Muhammad v. Com.· Concurrence†	619 S.E.2d 16	154
2008	Schmidt v. Household Finance Corp., II	661 S.E.2d 834	131
2007	Nusbaum v. Berlin	641 S.E.2d 494	127
2010	Hamilton v. Com.	688 S.E.2d 168	115
2001	Commonwealth v. Sands	553 S.E.2d 733	113
2007	Almy v. Grisham· Concurrence†	639 S.E.2d 182	112
2001	Shackleford v. Commonwealth	547 S.E.2d 899	109
2003	Koffman v. Garnett· Concurrence†	574 S.E.2d 258	106

Showing the 15 most-cited of 255 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 Cynthia D. Kinser on?: Cynthia D. Kinser was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

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29 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).