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 1986 / Served to 1987

John D. White

Justice, Supreme Court of Kentucky

John D. White was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky, who joined the court in 1986. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1986–1987 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1986	Supreme Court of Kentucky	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, White authored 5 published opinions for the court (1986). Most cited: Todd v. Commonwealth (34 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. 2 of these were attributed to White 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
1986	Todd v. Commonwealth	716 S.W.2d 242	34
1986	Williams v. Commonwealth	721 S.W.2d 710	26
1986	Hargrave v. Commonwealth	724 S.W.2d 202	17
1986	Commonwealth Revenue Cabinet ex rel. Gillis v. Graham†	710 S.W.2d 227	3
1986	Brown v. Commonwealth†	711 S.W.2d 488	0

Showing the 5 most-cited of 5 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 D. White on?: John D. White 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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1 year 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).