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 1947 / Served to 1973

Hamilton S. Burnett

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

Hamilton S. Burnett was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1947. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1895–1973
Tenure: 1947–1973 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1947	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Education

Carson-Newman University
University of Virginia-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Burnett authored 543 published opinions for the court (1947–1969), plus 5 dissents. Most cited: Liakas v. State (1,116 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. 203 of these were attributed to Burnett 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
1956	Liakas v. State	286 S.W.2d 856	1,116
1966	Bolin v. State	405 S.W.2d 768	1,054
1958	Marable v. State	313 S.W.2d 451	696
1966	Paschall's, Inc. v. Dozier	407 S.W.2d 150	279
1964	Monts v. State	379 S.W.2d 34	205
1955	Petty v. Sloan	277 S.W.2d 355	187
1956	Hooper v. State	297 S.W.2d 78	149
1968	Marsh v. Henderson	424 S.W.2d 193	135
1959	Sherrill v. State	321 S.W.2d 811	134
1965	Stubbs v. State	393 S.W.2d 150	127
1966	Medlin v. Allied Investment Company	398 S.W.2d 270	126
1966	Ford Motor Company v. Lonon	398 S.W.2d 240	100
1963	Liberty Mutual Insurance Company v. Stevenson	368 S.W.2d 760	88
1959	Smith v. State	327 S.W.2d 308	88
1966	Allright Auto Parks, Inc. v. Berry	409 S.W.2d 361	80

Showing the 15 most-cited of 549 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 Hamilton S. Burnett on?: Hamilton S. Burnett 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).