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 1980 / Served to 1993

John P. Gardner

Justice, Supreme Court of South Carolina

John P. Gardner was a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1980–1993 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Supreme Court of South Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Gardner authored 2 published opinions for the court (1991–1992). Most cited: State v. Simmons (21 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. 1 of these was attributed to Gardner 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
1992	State v. Simmons	417 S.E.2d 92	21
1991	State v. Jeffcoat†	305 S.C. 339	0

Showing the 2 most-cited of 2 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 John P. Gardner on?: John P. Gardner 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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13 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).