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 1928 / Served to 1947

Henry W. Holt

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Henry W. Holt was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia (10 judges, selected by legislative election), who joined the court in 1928. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1864–1947
Tenure: 1928–1947 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1928	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

Washington and Lee University

Judicial Record

In our data, Holt authored 434 published opinions for the court (1928–1947), plus 40 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Cobb v. Commonwealth (146 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. 480 of these were attributed to Holt 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
1929	Cobb v. Commonwealth†	152 Va. 941	146
1934	Watkins v. Hall†	161 Va. 924	101
1942	Foster v. Commonwealth†	179 Va. 96	88
1931	Boggs v. Plybon†	157 Va. 30	86
1940	Eaton v. Davis· Dissent†	176 Va. 330	82
1937	West Bros. Brick Co. v. City of Alexandria†	169 Va. 271	78
1940	Commonwealth v. Dodson†	176 Va. 281	68
1934	Bray v. Landergren†	161 Va. 699	61
1935	Reynolds v. Milk Commission· Dissent†	163 Va. 957	59
1928	Oliver v. Commonwealth†	151 Va. 533	56
1936	Thomas Gemmell, Inc. v. Svea Fire & Life Insurance†	166 Va. 95	55
1932	Wyatt v. Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co.†	158 Va. 470	55
1935	Epperson v. DeJarnette†	164 Va. 482	54
1937	Bell v. Commonwealth†	167 Va. 526	52
1935	Coward v. Commonwealth†	164 Va. 639	50

Showing the 15 most-cited of 480 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 Henry W. Holt on?: Henry W. Holt was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Sources

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

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19 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).