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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Texas / Joined 1979 / Served to 1990

Franklin S. Spears

Justice, Supreme Court of Texas

Franklin S. Spears was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1931–1996
Tenure: 1979–1990 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Supreme Court of Texas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Spears authored 125 published opinions for the court (1979–1990), plus 26 dissents and 23 concurrences. Most cited: Nixon v. Mr. Property Management Co. (7,748 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. 57 of these were attributed to Spears 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
1985	Nixon v. Mr. Property Management Co.· Concurrence†	690 S.W.2d 546	7,748
1979	City of Houston v. Clear Creek Basin Authority	589 S.W.2d 671	5,187
1983	Coker v. Coker· Dissent†	650 S.W.2d 391	2,505
1985	Holick v. Smith	685 S.W.2d 18	1,964
1983	Croucher v. Croucher	660 S.W.2d 55	1,105
1981	Murff v. Murff	615 S.W.2d 696	988
1984	Duncan v. Cessna Aircraft Co.	665 S.W.2d 414	847
1987	El Chico Corp. v. Poole	732 S.W.2d 306	844
1990	Moreno v. Sterling Drug, Inc.	787 S.W.2d 348	748
1979	Stoner v. Thompson	578 S.W.2d 679	635
1983	Trenholm v. Ratcliff	646 S.W.2d 927	634
1986	Villegas v. Carter	711 S.W.2d 624	598
1986	Castleberry v. Branscum	721 S.W.2d 270	593
1983	Corbin v. Safeway Stores, Inc.	648 S.W.2d 292	541
1987	Reilly v. Rangers Management, Inc.	727 S.W.2d 527	538

Showing the 15 most-cited of 178 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 Texas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Franklin S. Spears on?: Franklin S. Spears was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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