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

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Supreme Court of Virginia / Joined 1951 / Served to 1956

Lemuel F. Smith

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Lemuel F. Smith was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1951. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1890–1956
Tenure: 1951–1956 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1951	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

University of Virginia-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 89 published opinions for the court (1850–1956), plus 4 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Carwile v. Richmond Newspapers, Inc. (198 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. 70 of these were attributed to Smith 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
1954	Carwile v. Richmond Newspapers, Inc.†	196 Va. 1	198
1954	Wright v. Commonwealth	196 Va. 132	125
1956	Universal C. I. T. Credit Corp. v. Kaplan†	198 Va. 67	85
1955	Bradley v. Commonwealth†	196 Va. 1126	76
1955	City of Norfolk v. Virginia Electric & Power Co.†	197 Va. 505	60
1953	Harlow v. Commonwealth	195 Va. 269	60
1955	Matthews v. Hicks, Adm'r.†	197 Va. 112	48
1954	Spradlin v. Commonwealth	195 Va. 523	48
1955	Day v. Commonwealth†	196 Va. 907	47
1954	Lynch v. Johnson†	196 Va. 516	47
1953	McClanahan v. California Spray-Chemical Corp.†	194 Va. 842	44
1952	F. S. Bowen Electric Co. v. Foley†	194 Va. 92	42
1952	Tiller v. Commonwealth†	193 Va. 418	37
1953	Surf Realty Corp. v. Standing†	195 Va. 431	35
1955	Owens v. Owens†	196 Va. 966	33

Showing the 15 most-cited of 94 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 Virginia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was Lemuel F. Smith on?: Lemuel F. Smith was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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