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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Mississippi / Joined 1977 / Served to 1985

Francis S. Bowling

Justice, Supreme Court of Mississippi

Francis S. Bowling was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1977–1985 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

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

Judicial Record

In our data, Bowling authored 77 published opinions for the court (1977–1985), plus 7 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Stringer v. State (648 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. 68 of these were attributed to Bowling 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
1984	Stringer v. State	454 So. 2d 468	648
1978	Voyles v. State	362 So. 2d 1236	283
1982	Wheat v. State	420 So. 2d 229	260
1983	Pruett v. State	431 So. 2d 1101	251
1982	Pruett v. City of Rosedale	421 So. 2d 1046	173
1983	Reserve Life Ins. Co. v. McGee	444 So. 2d 803	69
1980	Turner v. State· Dissent†	383 So. 2d 489	61
1983	Edwards v. Thigpen· Concurrence†	433 So. 2d 906	48
1982	Anderson v. Jackson Mun. Airport Auth.	419 So. 2d 1010	45
1984	Blanks v. State	451 So. 2d 775	31
1983	Wheat v. Thigpen	431 So. 2d 486	28
1978	Shippers Express v. Chapman· Dissent†	364 So. 2d 1097	24
1981	Woods v. State	393 So. 2d 1319	23
1980	Ryan v. Wardlaw†	382 So. 2d 1078	23
1984	Yates v. State	467 So. 2d 884	18

Showing the 15 most-cited of 85 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 Mississippi reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Francis S. Bowling on?: Francis S. Bowling was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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