How do judges of the Supreme Court of Texas reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Texas / Joined 1977 / Served to 1977

Don Yarbrough

Justice, Supreme Court of Texas

Don Yarbrough was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1941 · age 85
Tenure: 1977–1977

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Supreme Court of Texas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Yarbrough authored 1 published opinion for the court (1977), plus 2 dissents. Most cited: Taggart v. Taggart (162 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. 2 of these were attributed to Yarbrough 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
1977	Taggart v. Taggart· Dissent†	552 S.W.2d 422	162
1977	Waites v. Sondock	561 S.W.2d 772	45
1977	Gammage v. Compton· Dissent†	548 S.W.2d 1	10

Showing the 3 most-cited of 3 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 Texas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Don Yarbrough on?: Don Yarbrough was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas.

Sources

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

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Joined the court in 1977. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).