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 2015 / Active

Denham Arthur Kelsey

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Denham Arthur Kelsey is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, serving since 2015. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2015 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2015	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

Old Dominion University
College of William and Mary

Judicial Record

In our data, Kelsey authored 49 published opinions for the court (2015–2019), plus 2 dissents. Most cited: Vasquez v. Commonwealth (631 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. 51 of these were attributed to Kelsey 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
2016	Vasquez v. Commonwealth†	781 S.E.2d 920	631
2017	Commonwealth v. White†	799 S.E.2d 494	454
2017	MacDougall v. Levick†	805 S.E.2d 775	355
2016	Du v. Commonwealth†	790 S.E.2d 493	322
2015	Bowman v. Commonwealth†	777 S.E.2d 851	170
2018	Coward v. Wellmont Health System†	812 S.E.2d 766	126
2017	Jones v. Commonwealth†	795 S.E.2d 705	123
2016	Babcock & Wilcox Co. v. Areva NP, Inc.†	788 S.E.2d 237	88
2017	Forest Lakes Cmty. Ass'n, Inc. v. United Land Corp. of Am.†	795 S.E.2d 875	61
2016	Tvardek v. Powhatan Vill. Homeowners Ass'n, Inc.†	784 S.E.2d 280	60
2017	Rickman v. Commonwealth†	808 S.E.2d 395	54
2017	Funny Guy, LLC v. Lecego, LLC†	795 S.E.2d 887	53
2015	Evans v. Commonwealth†	776 S.E.2d 760	47
2016	Cherrie v. Virginia Health Services†	787 S.E.2d 855	46
2017	AGCS Marine Ins. Co. v. Arlington Cnty.†	800 S.E.2d 159	41

Showing the 15 most-cited of 51 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 is Denham Arthur Kelsey on?: Denham Arthur Kelsey is 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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11 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).