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 1927 / Served to 1953

Joel B. Brown

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Joel B. Brown was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1927. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1872–1953
Tenure: 1927–1953 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1927	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Brown authored 1,514 published opinions for the court (1927–1953), plus 121 dissents and 51 concurrences. Most cited: Alabama State Federation of Labor v. McAdory (243 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. 144 of these were attributed to Brown 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
1944	Alabama State Federation of Labor v. McAdory· Dissent	18 So. 2d 810	243
1946	Phillips v. State· Dissent	28 So. 2d 542	148
1928	Alabama State Bridge Corporation v. Smith· Dissent	116 So. 695	96
1937	Gentry v. Swann Chemical Co.	174 So. 530	93
1933	Ex Parte Grimmett	152 So. 263	93
1929	Doss v. State	123 So. 231	93
1933	Ex Parte Thompson· Separate	152 So. 229	79
1928	Kelly v. Carmichael	117 So. 67	77
1952	Fuller v. State	60 So. 2d 202	70
1949	McKee v. State†	253 Ala. 235	70
1937	Beeland Wholesale Co. v. Kaufman· Dissent	174 So. 516	70
1940	Vernon v. State	196 So. 96	67
1936	Yeilding v. State Ex Rel. Wilkinson· Dissent	167 So. 580	60
1928	Spooney v. State	115 So. 308	59
1947	Ex Parte Taylor· Dissent	32 So. 2d 659	58

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,697 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 Joel B. Brown on?: Joel B. Brown was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

Sources

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

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26 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).