How do judges of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals / Joined 1921 / Served to 1951

Frank Lee Hawkins

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Frank Lee Hawkins was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1921. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1866 · age 160
Tenure: 1921–1951 · 30 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1921	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hawkins authored 3,210 published opinions for the court (1920–1951), plus 25 dissents and 28 concurrences. Most cited: Chapin v. State (100 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. 1,839 of these were attributed to Hawkins 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
1927	Chapin v. State· Dissent	296 S.W. 1095	100
1944	Wolfe v. State	178 S.W.2d 274	97
1922	Welchek v. State· Separate	247 S.W. 524	97
1923	Vineyard v. State	257 S.W. 548	90
1942	Ex Parte Carson· Separate	159 S.W.2d 126	89
1928	McLaughlin v. State	4 S.W.2d 54	86
1948	Garcia v. State· Separate	210 S.W.2d 574	85
1921	Boone v. State· Separate	235 S.W. 580	76
1944	Ex Parte Halsted· Separate	182 S.W.2d 479	74
1927	Minor v. State· Separate	299 S.W. 422	72
1928	Silver v. State· Separate	8 S.W.2d 144	66
1937	Arbuckle v. State	105 S.W.2d 219	65
1941	Grice v. State· Separate†	142 Tex. Crim. 4	61
1944	Ex Parte Traxler	184 S.W.2d 286	58
1922	Childress v. State	241 S.W. 1029	56

Showing the 15 most-cited of 4,843 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 Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Frank Lee Hawkins on?: Frank Lee Hawkins was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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