How do judges of the Supreme Court of South Carolina reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Supreme Court of South Carolina / Joined 1961 / Served to 1984

James Woodrow Lewis

Justice, Supreme Court of South Carolina

James Woodrow Lewis was a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, who joined the court in 1961. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1912 · age 114
Tenure: 1961–1984 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1961	Supreme Court of South Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Lewis authored 781 published opinions for the court (1953–1984), plus 60 dissents and 12 concurrences. Most cited: Lark v. Bi-Lo, Inc. (458 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. 314 of these were attributed to Lewis 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
1981	Lark v. Bi-Lo, Inc.	276 S.E.2d 304	458
1969	Mickle v. Blackmon· Dissent†	166 S.E.2d 173	101
1983	Moseley v. Mosier· Dissent†	306 S.E.2d 624	98
1981	State v. Adams· Concurrence†	283 S.E.2d 582	90
1984	State v. Plath	313 S.E.2d 619	85
1980	Terlinde v. Neely	271 S.E.2d 768	79
1978	Hegler v. Gulf Insurance Co.	243 S.E.2d 443	60
1978	Broome v. Truluck	241 S.E.2d 739	58
1978	Anderson Ex Rel. Estate of Anderson v. West· Concurrence†	241 S.E.2d 551	56
1972	State v. Crowe	188 S.E.2d 379	55
1963	Bridges v. Wyandotte Worsted Co.	132 S.E.2d 18	52
1970	Rutledge v. Dodenhoff	175 S.E.2d 792	50
1968	Jones v. Garner	158 S.E.2d 909	48
1982	State v. Smart	299 S.E.2d 686	47
1973	Hogan v. Home Insurance Co.	194 S.E.2d 890	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 853 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 South Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was James Woodrow Lewis on?: James Woodrow Lewis was a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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