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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Alabama / Joined 1898 / Served to 1904

Henry A. Sharpe

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Henry A. Sharpe was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama (9 judges, selected by partisan election), who joined the court in 1898. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1848 · age 178
Tenure: 1898–1904 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1898	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

Samford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Sharpe authored 333 published opinions for the court (1898–1904), plus 3 dissents. Most cited: Amos v. State (54 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. 336 of these were attributed to Sharpe 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
1898	Amos v. State†	123 Ala. 50	54
1900	Black v. Pate†	130 Ala. 514	51
1898	Alabama State Mutual Assurance Co. v. Long Clothing & Shoe Co.†	123 Ala. 667	51
1898	Stephenson v. Allison· Dissent†	123 Ala. 439	49
1898	Gafford v. State†	122 Ala. 54	48
1899	Tartt v. Negus†	127 Ala. 301	46
1899	Hayes v. Southern Home Building & Loan Ass'n†	124 Ala. 663	45
1902	Osborne v. Alabama Steel & Wire Co.†	135 Ala. 571	42
1900	Barrett v. City of Mobile†	129 Ala. 179	42
1901	Southworth v. Shea†	131 Ala. 419	34
1902	Oakley v. State†	135 Ala. 15	32
1900	Stewart v. White†	128 Ala. 202	32
1898	Southern Railway v. Guyton†	122 Ala. 231	32
1898	Richardson v. Stephens†	122 Ala. 301	32
1903	Mitchell v. State†	140 Ala. 118	31

Showing the 15 most-cited of 336 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 Alabama reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Henry A. Sharpe on?: Henry A. Sharpe was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

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