How do judges of the Supreme Court of Kentucky reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Kentucky / Joined 1976 / Served to 1982

John S. Palmore

Justice, Supreme Court of Kentucky

John S. Palmore was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky, who joined the court in 1976. He previously served on the Kentucky Court of Appeals. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1917 · age 109
Tenure: 1976–1982 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1976	Supreme Court of Kentucky	–	–
1959	Kentucky Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

University of Louisville

Judicial Record

In our data, Palmore authored 862 published opinions for the court (1959–1982), plus 34 dissents and 17 concurrences. Most cited: Jett v. Commonwealth (135 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. 589 of these were attributed to Palmore 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
1969	Jett v. Commonwealth	436 S.W.2d 788	135
1977	Trowel v. Commonwealth	550 S.W.2d 530	127
1969	Abernathy v. Commonwealth	439 S.W.2d 949	125
1975	Fann v. McGuffey	534 S.W.2d 770	85
1974	Cox v. Cooper	510 S.W.2d 530	73
1970	Orr v. Coleman	455 S.W.2d 59	66
1977	Romans v. Commonwealth	547 S.W.2d 128	65
1965	Merritt v. Commonwealth	386 S.W.2d 727	65
1978	Ex Parte Farley	570 S.W.2d 617	63
1967	Lewis v. Commonwealth	411 S.W.2d 321	62
1963	Lee v. International Harvester Company	373 S.W.2d 418	62
1980	Smith v. Commonwealth· Concurrence†	599 S.W.2d 900	61
1977	Brown v. Commonwealth	551 S.W.2d 557	60
1966	Preston v. Commonwealth	406 S.W.2d 398	60
1960	Stewart v. Commonwealth Ex Rel. Department of Highways	337 S.W.2d 880	58

Showing the 15 most-cited of 913 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 Kentucky reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was John S. Palmore on?: John S. Palmore was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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6 years on the Supreme Court of Kentucky. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).