How do judges of the Supreme Court of South Carolina reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Supreme Court of South Carolina / Joined 1980 / Served to 1994

David Walker Harwell

Justice, Supreme Court of South Carolina

David Walker Harwell was a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1932 · age 94
Tenure: 1980–1994 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Supreme Court of South Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Harwell authored 454 published opinions for the court (1980–1994), plus 34 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: Small v. Springs Industries, Inc. (134 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. 136 of these were attributed to Harwell 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
1987	Small v. Springs Industries, Inc.	357 S.E.2d 452	134
1994	Kiriakides v. United Artists Communications, Inc.	440 S.E.2d 364	125
1981	State v. Linder	278 S.E.2d 335	114
1981	Cherry v. Thomasson	280 S.E.2d 541	113
1984	Palmetto Alliance, Inc. v. South Carolina Public Service Commission	319 S.E.2d 695	104
1982	In the Matter of Treacy· Dissent†	290 S.E.2d 240	104
1989	Donahue v. Donahue	384 S.E.2d 741	100
1981	Todd v. South Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance	278 S.E.2d 607	100
1990	SSI Medical Services, Inc. v. Cox	392 S.E.2d 789	99
1983	Moseley v. Mosier	306 S.E.2d 624	98
1991	State v. Sims	405 S.E.2d 377	97
1989	Tiger, Inc. Ex Rel. Green Apple Partnership v. Fisher Agro, Inc.	391 S.E.2d 538	94
1992	Crossley v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance	415 S.E.2d 393	91
1990	State v. Rochester	391 S.E.2d 244	90
1981	State v. Adams	283 S.E.2d 582	90

Showing the 15 most-cited of 497 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 South Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was David Walker Harwell on?: David Walker Harwell was a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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14 years on the Supreme Court of South Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).