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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Mississippi / Joined 2001 / Served to 2011

James Earl Graves Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of Mississippi

James Earl Graves Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, who joined the court in 2001. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1953 · age 73
Tenure: 2001–2011 · 10 yrs
Education: Millsaps College 1975

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2001	Supreme Court of Mississippi	–	–

Education

Millsaps College	B.A.	1975
Syracuse University	M.P.A.	1981

Judicial Record

In our data, Graves authored 65 published opinions for the court (2002–2011), plus 22 dissents and 16 concurrences. Most cited: Pitchford v. State (129 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. 103 of these were attributed to Graves 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
2010	Pitchford v. State· Dissent†	45 So. 3d 216	129
2004	Dycus v. State†	875 So. 2d 140	121
2010	Gillett v. State†	56 So. 3d 469	115
2008	United States Fidelity and Guaranty Co. of Mississippi v. Martin†	998 So. 2d 956	110
2009	Doss v. State†	19 So. 3d 690	77
2009	Covenant Health & Rehabilitation of Picayune, LP v. Estate of Moulds Ex Rel. Braddock· Concurrence†	14 So. 3d 695	77
2006	Hobgood v. State· Dissent†	926 So. 2d 847	76
2009	Price v. Clark· Dissent†	21 So. 3d 509	75
2010	Means v. State· Concurrence†	43 So. 3d 438	72
2010	Mladineo v. Schmidt· Concurrence†	52 So. 3d 1154	68
2010	Hall v. City of Ridgeland†	37 So. 3d 25	59
2009	Solanki v. Ervin†	21 So. 3d 552	58
2010	Worthy v. McNair· Dissent†	37 So. 3d 609	49
2010	Williams v. State· Concurrence†	35 So. 3d 480	45
2009	Arceo v. Tolliver· Dissent†	19 So. 3d 67	45

Showing the 15 most-cited of 103 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 Mississippi reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was James Earl Graves Jr. on?: James Earl Graves Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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