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 2000 / Former Justice

Donald W. Lemons

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Donald W. Lemons was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 2000. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1949 · age 77
Tenure: 2000 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

University of Virginia-Main Campus
University of Virginia-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Lemons authored 192 published opinions for the court (2000–2019), plus 3 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Hudson (850 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. 37 of these were attributed to Lemons 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
2003	Commonwealth v. Hudson	578 S.E.2d 781	850
2005	Muhammad v. Com.	611 S.E.2d 537	379
2011	Landrum v. CHIPPENHAM AND JOHNSTON-WILLIS	717 S.E.2d 134	245
2017	Commonwealth v. Moseley†	799 S.E.2d 683	241
2010	Perry v. Com.	701 S.E.2d 431	219
2009	Smallwood v. Com.	688 S.E.2d 154	199
2010	Avent v. Com.	688 S.E.2d 244	190
2001	Simmons v. Miller	544 S.E.2d 666	158
2007	Howell v. Com.	652 S.E.2d 107	156
2002	Eure v. Norfolk Shipbuilding & Drydock Corp.	561 S.E.2d 663	154
2009	Rowe v. Com.	675 S.E.2d 161	153
2005	Viney v. Com.	609 S.E.2d 26	141
2004	Winston v. Com.	604 S.E.2d 21	135
2002	TM Delmarva Power, L.L.C. v. NCP of Virginia, L.L.C.	557 S.E.2d 199	134
2003	Glazebrook v. Board of Supervisors	587 S.E.2d 589	120

Showing the 15 most-cited of 198 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 Donald W. Lemons on?: Donald W. Lemons was 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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26 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).