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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Supreme Court of Tennessee / Joined 1990 / Served to 2006

E Riley Anderson

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

E Riley Anderson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1990. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1932 · age 94
Tenure: 1990–2006 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1990	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Anderson authored 355 published opinions for the court (1990–2012), plus 6 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Goad v. State (2,686 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. 71 of these were attributed to Anderson 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
1996	Goad v. State	938 S.W.2d 363	2,686
1996	State v. Odom· Concurrence†	928 S.W.2d 18	1,978
1992	State v. Harris· Concurrence†	839 S.W.2d 54	1,328
1993	Union Carbide Corp. v. Huddleston	854 S.W.2d 87	1,162
1994	State v. Cazes	875 S.W.2d 253	901
2000	Wyatt v. State	24 S.W.3d 319	733
1996	Campbell v. Florida Steel Corp.	919 S.W.2d 26	732
2002	State v. Imfeld	70 S.W.3d 698	711
1994	State v. Bigbee†	885 S.W.2d 797	691
1992	Burford v. State	845 S.W.2d 204	640
1994	State v. Stephenson	878 S.W.2d 530	598
1993	State v. Howell	868 S.W.2d 238	552
2002	Nichols v. State	90 S.W.3d 576	524
1992	State v. Middlebrooks	840 S.W.2d 317	519
1995	Owens v. State	908 S.W.2d 923	507

Showing the 15 most-cited of 371 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 Tennessee reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was E Riley Anderson on?: E Riley Anderson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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