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

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Supreme Court of Virginia / Joined 1969 / Served to 1987

George M. Cochran

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

George M. Cochran was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1969. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1912–2011
Tenure: 1969–1987 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1969	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

University of Virginia-Main Campus
University of Virginia-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Cochran authored 372 published opinions for the court (1969–1987), plus 26 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Coleman v. Commonwealth (400 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. 262 of these were attributed to Cochran 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
1983	Coleman v. Commonwealth†	307 S.E.2d 864	400
1979	Stamper v. Commonwealth†	257 S.E.2d 808	380
1980	Fore v. Commonwealth†	265 S.E.2d 729	284
1986	Frye v. Commonwealth	345 S.E.2d 267	272
1980	James v. Jane· Concurrence†	282 S.E.2d 864	268
1984	Messina v. Burden· Dissent†	321 S.E.2d 657	250
1982	Fitzgerald v. Commonwealth†	223 Va. 615	187
1983	Turner v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	309 S.E.2d 337	180
1984	Allen Realty Corp. v. Holbert	318 S.E.2d 592	175
1978	Floyd v. Commonwealth†	219 Va. 575	170
1976	Inge v. Commonwealth†	217 Va. 360	170
1979	Coppola v. Commonwealth†	257 S.E.2d 797	162
1985	Watkins v. Commonwealth	331 S.E.2d 422	154
1982	Naccash v. Burger· Dissent†	223 Va. 406	145
1987	Correll v. Commonwealth	352 S.E.2d 352	132

Showing the 15 most-cited of 406 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 Virginia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was George M. Cochran on?: George M. Cochran was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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