How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Court of Appeals of Tennessee / Joined 1978 / Served to 2012

Herschel Franks

Judge, Court of Appeals of Tennessee

Herschel Franks was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1978. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1978–2012 · 34 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1978	Court of Appeals of Tennessee	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Franks authored 1,076 published opinions for the court (1978–2012), plus 17 dissents and 11 concurrences. Most cited: Bean v. Bean (384 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. 257 of these were attributed to Franks 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
2000	Bean v. Bean	40 S.W.3d 52	384
1998	Rutherford v. Polar Tank Trailer, Inc.	978 S.W.2d 102	130
2005	Tucker v. Sierra Builders· Dissent†	180 S.W.3d 109	116
1996	Blair v. Badenhope	940 S.W.2d 575	86
1991	Musselman v. Acuff	826 S.W.2d 920	80
1999	Smith v. Smith	984 S.W.2d 606	67
1993	Duchow v. Whalen	872 S.W.2d 692	67
1992	Oak Ridge Precision Industries, Inc. v. First Tennessee Bank National Ass'n	835 S.W.2d 25	67
1999	Arnold v. City of Chattanooga	19 S.W.3d 779	66
1995	Collins v. Greene County Bank	916 S.W.2d 941	64
1980	Thornburg v. Chase	606 S.W.2d 672	64
1986	Barber & McMurry, Inc. v. Top-Flite Development Corp.	720 S.W.2d 469	57
1983	Seay v. City of Knoxville· Dissent†	654 S.W.2d 397	56
1988	Gotwald v. Gotwald· Concurrence†	768 S.W.2d 689	55
1984	Haun v. King	690 S.W.2d 869	55

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,104 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 Court of Appeals of Tennessee reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Herschel Franks on?: Herschel Franks was a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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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34 years on the Court of Appeals of Tennessee. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).