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 1980 / Served to 2005

Frank F. Drowota III

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

Frank F. Drowota III was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1938 · age 88
Tenure: 1980–2005 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Education

Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University

Judicial Record

In our data, Drowota authored 570 published opinions for the court (1980–2005), plus 38 dissents and 26 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Bland (3,458 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. 230 of these were attributed to Drowota 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
1997	State v. Bland	958 S.W.2d 651	3,458
1997	Henley v. State	960 S.W.2d 572	2,590
1993	Byrd v. Hall	847 S.W.2d 208	2,103
1992	State v. Evans	838 S.W.2d 185	1,810
1992	State v. Harris	839 S.W.2d 54	1,328
2000	State v. Carruthers	35 S.W.3d 516	1,277
1992	Hodges v. S.C. Toof & Co.	833 S.W.2d 896	1,138
2002	State v. Reid†	91 S.W.3d 247	1,120
1997	Bain v. Wells	936 S.W.2d 618	1,057
1983	State v. Williams	657 S.W.2d 405	1,043
2000	Momon v. State	18 S.W.3d 152	1,008
1991	State v. Harkins	811 S.W.2d 79	977
1999	Taylor v. State	995 S.W.2d 78	842
1995	Carvell v. Bottoms	900 S.W.2d 23	837
1986	State v. Moss	727 S.W.2d 229	822

Showing the 15 most-cited of 634 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 Frank F. Drowota III on?: Frank F. Drowota III 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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25 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).