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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Alabama / Joined 1999 / Served to 2005

Douglas I. Johnstone

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Douglas I. Johnstone was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1999. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1999–2005 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1999	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Johnstone authored 220 published opinions for the court (1999–2005), plus 140 dissents and 128 concurrences. Most cited: Ex Parte the Boc Group, Inc. (201 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. 329 of these were attributed to Johnstone 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
2001	Ex Parte the Boc Group, Inc.· Concurrence†	823 So. 2d 1270	201
2002	Ex Parte Waldrop· Dissent†	859 So. 2d 1181	166
1999	TranSouth Financial Corp. v. Bell· Concurrence†	739 So. 2d 1110	162
2000	Ex Parte Rizk	791 So. 2d 911	148
1999	Delchamps, Inc. v. Bryant· Dissent†	738 So. 2d 824	147
2002	Ex Parte Perkins· Concurrence†	851 So. 2d 453	137
2000	Ex Parte Travis· Concurrence†	776 So. 2d 874	120
2002	Reynolds Metals Company v. Hill· Dissent†	825 So. 2d 100	115
1999	Rogers Foundation Repair, Inc. v. Powell	748 So. 2d 869	113
2001	Ex Parte McInnis	820 So. 2d 795	106
2000	Ex Parte Ryals	773 So. 2d 1011	104
1999	Ex Parte Wiginton	743 So. 2d 1071	100
2003	Bruce v. Cole	854 So. 2d 47	96
2002	Elliott v. Van Kleef· Concurrence†	830 So. 2d 726	95
2003	Ex Parte Hodges· Concurrence†	856 So. 2d 936	94

Showing the 15 most-cited of 488 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 Alabama reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Douglas I. Johnstone on?: Douglas I. Johnstone was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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