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 2008 / Active

John W. Kittredge

Chief Justice, Supreme Court of South Carolina

John W. Kittredge is a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, serving since 2008. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1956 · age 70
Tenure: Since 2008 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2008	Supreme Court of South Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Kittredge authored 165 published opinions for the court (2008–2019), plus 22 dissents and 23 concurrences. Most cited: Lewis v. Lewis (543 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. 205 of these were attributed to Kittredge 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
2011	Lewis v. Lewis†	709 S.E.2d 650	543
2011	Simmons v. Simmons†	709 S.E.2d 666	337
2011	State v. Jennings· Concurrence†	716 S.E.2d 91	122
2009	State v. White†	676 S.E.2d 684	85
2009	State v. Belcher†	685 S.E.2d 802	80
2014	State v. Collins· Concurrence†	409 S.C. 524	79
2013	Shirley's Iron Works, Inc. v. City of Union†	403 S.C. 560	79
2011	Crossmann Communities of North Carolina, Inc. v. Harleysville Mutual Insurance†	717 S.E.2d 589	72
2013	State v. Curry†	406 S.C. 364	69
2009	Rydde v. Morris†	675 S.E.2d 431	69
2010	Austin v. Stokes-Craven Holding Corp.· Concurrence†	691 S.E.2d 135	60
2010	Smith v. State†	689 S.E.2d 629	59
2009	State v. Herring· Concurrence†	692 S.E.2d 490	57
2010	Branham v. Ford Motor Co.†	701 S.E.2d 5	55
2010	State v. Tindall· Dissent†	698 S.E.2d 203	50

Showing the 15 most-cited of 210 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 is John W. Kittredge on?: John W. Kittredge is a Chief 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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18 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).