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 1993 / Served to 2009

James W. Smith Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of Mississippi

James W. Smith Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, who joined the court in 1993. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1943 · age 83
Tenure: 1993–2009 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1993	Supreme Court of Mississippi	–	–

Education

University of Southern Mississippi

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 171 published opinions for the court (1993–2008), plus 39 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: Chase v. State (466 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. 129 of these were attributed to Smith 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
1994	Chase v. State	645 So. 2d 829	466
1997	Evans v. State	725 So. 2d 613	404
1997	Holland v. State	705 So. 2d 307	380
1996	Blue v. State	674 So. 2d 1184	332
2001	Simmons v. State	805 So. 2d 452	301
1996	Williams v. State	684 So. 2d 1179	275
1996	Foster v. State	687 So. 2d 1124	230
2000	Flowers v. State	773 So. 2d 309	222
1997	Collins v. State	691 So. 2d 918	191
1997	Booker v. State· Dissent†	699 So. 2d 132	148
1993	Hatten v. State	628 So. 2d 294	122
2002	Knox v. State†	805 So. 2d 527	112
2004	Rein v. Benchmark Const. Co.	865 So. 2d 1134	100
2007	R.K. v. J.K.†	946 So. 2d 764	99
1998	LITTLE BY LITTLE v. Bell	719 So. 2d 757	87

Showing the 15 most-cited of 218 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 W. Smith Jr. on?: James W. Smith 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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16 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).