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 2007 / Former Justice

Donald W. Beatty

Justice, Supreme Court of South Carolina

Donald W. Beatty was a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina (5 judges, selected by legislative election), who joined the court in 2007. He previously served on the Court of Appeals of South Carolina. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2007 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Court of Appeals of South Carolina	–	–
2007	Supreme Court of South Carolina	–	–

Education

South Carolina State University
South Carolina State University

Judicial Record

In our data, Beatty authored 303 published opinions for the court (2003–2019), plus 24 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Black (110 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. 275 of these were attributed to Beatty 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
2012	State v. Black†	400 S.C. 10	110
2010	State v. Mattison†	697 S.E.2d 578	108
2013	South Carolina Department of Social Services v. Sarah W.· Dissent†	402 S.C. 324	106
2011	State v. Brandt†	713 S.E.2d 591	97
2008	USAA Property & Casualty Insurance v. Clegg Ex Rel. Estate of Clegg†	661 S.E.2d 791	95
2013	State v. Kromah†	401 S.C. 340	94
2012	RFT Management Co. v. Tinsley & Adams L.L.P.†	399 S.C. 322	93
2014	State v. Collins†	409 S.C. 524	79
2010	State v. Sweat†	688 S.E.2d 569	76
2010	Quail Hill, LLC v. County of Richland†	692 S.E.2d 499	71
2009	Hooper v. Ebenezer Senior Services & Rehabilitation Center†	687 S.E.2d 29	70
2011	Town of Mt. Pleasant v. Roberts†	713 S.E.2d 278	68
2010	Austin v. Stokes-Craven Holding Corp.†	691 S.E.2d 135	60
2014	Williams v. Government Employees Insurance†	409 S.C. 586	58
2010	Hill v. South Carolina Department of Health & Environmental Control†	389 S.C. 1	57

Showing the 15 most-cited of 342 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 Donald W. Beatty on?: Donald W. Beatty 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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19 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).