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 1971 / Served to 1977

Howell T. Heflin

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Howell T. Heflin was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1971. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1921–2005
Tenure: 1971–1977 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1971	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

Birmingham Southern College
The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Heflin authored 130 published opinions for the court (1971–1977), plus 37 dissents and 36 concurrences. Most cited: Tolbert v. Gulsby (104 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. 119 of these were attributed to Heflin 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
1976	Tolbert v. Gulsby	333 So. 2d 129	104
1975	Folmar v. Montgomery Fair Company, Inc.· Dissent†	309 So. 2d 818	89
1973	Horne v. Patton· Concurrence†	287 So. 2d 824	79
1973	Boswell v. State· Concurrence†	276 So. 2d 592	78
1975	Cates v. Bush	307 So. 2d 6	77
1974	Morgan County Commission v. Powell· Dissent†	293 So. 2d 830	77
1974	Twyman v. State· Dissent†	300 So. 2d 124	62
1975	Ex Parte Bynum· Concurrence†	312 So. 2d 52	59
1974	Bagby Elevator and Electric Company, Inc. v. McBride· Concurrence†	291 So. 2d 306	56
1972	Maslankowski v. Beam Ex Rel. Quernemeon	259 So. 2d 804	55
1971	Knight v. West Alabama Environmental Improvement Authority	246 So. 2d 903	55
1973	Nationwide Mutual Fire Insurance Co. v. Wilborn	279 So. 2d 460	50
1972	Harnage v. State· Dissent†	274 So. 2d 352	49
1974	Great Central Insurance Company v. Edge	298 So. 2d 607	46
1974	Rushing v. Hooper-McDonald, Inc.	300 So. 2d 94	45

Showing the 15 most-cited of 203 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 Howell T. Heflin on?: Howell T. Heflin 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

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5 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).