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 1852 / Served to 1854

John D. Phelan

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

John D. Phelan was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama (9 judges, selected by partisan election), who joined the court in 1852. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1810 · age 216
Tenure: 1852–1854 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1852	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Phelan authored 78 published opinions for the court (1852–1854), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: Riddle v. Brown (35 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. 79 of these were attributed to Phelan 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
1852	Riddle v. Brown†	20 Ala. 412	35
1853	Ex parte Smith· Concurrence†	23 Ala. 94	34
1854	Fowler v. Armour†	24 Ala. 194	27
1854	Pinckard's Distributees v. Pinckard's Administrators†	24 Ala. 250	26
1853	Ortez v. Jewett & Co.†	23 Ala. 662	24
1853	Minter v. Br. Bank†	23 Ala. 762	22
1852	Graham v. Newman†	21 Ala. 497	22
1852	Ross v. Ross†	20 Ala. 105	16
1852	Weems v. Bryan†	21 Ala. 302	14
1853	Woolfork's Adm'r v. Sullivan†	23 Ala. 548	13
1853	Bryan v. Smith†	22 Ala. 534	13
1852	Ewing v. Sanford†	21 Ala. 157	13
1853	Sanders v. Godley†	23 Ala. 473	12
1854	Walker v. Palmer†	24 Ala. 358	11
1854	Creswell v. Comm'rs' Court of Greene Co.†	24 Ala. 282	10

Showing the 15 most-cited of 79 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 D. Phelan on?: John D. Phelan 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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2 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).