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 1951 / Served to 1968

John L. Goodwyn

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

John L. Goodwyn was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1951. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1903–1968
Tenure: 1951–1968 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1951	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Goodwyn authored 574 published opinions for the court (1952–1968), plus 11 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Ball v. Jones (76 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. 386 of these were attributed to Goodwyn 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
1961	Ball v. Jones· Concurrence†	132 So. 2d 120	76
1953	Hill v. Rice	67 So. 2d 789	64
1958	City of Huntsville v. Miller	127 So. 2d 606	61
1968	Boykin v. State· Dissent†	207 So. 2d 412	54
1957	Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company v. Downey	96 So. 2d 278	54
1966	Mathis v. State	189 So. 2d 564	53
1967	Colonial Life and Accident Insurance Co. v. Collins	194 So. 2d 532	50
1954	Barbour v. State	78 So. 2d 328	48
1962	Jansen v. State Ex Rel. Downing	137 So. 2d 47	47
1955	Lamar v. Lamar†	263 Ala. 391	46
1952	Newberry v. City of Andalusia	57 So. 2d 629	45
1966	Hinton v. State	189 So. 2d 849	42
1952	Morgan County v. Hill†	257 Ala. 658	41
1964	Rogers v. City of Mobile	169 So. 2d 282	40
1957	Southern Cotton Oil Company v. Wynn	96 So. 2d 159	37

Showing the 15 most-cited of 593 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 John L. Goodwyn on?: John L. Goodwyn 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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17 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).