How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Texas reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Court of Appeals of Texas / Joined 1987 / Served to 2009

Linda Thomas

Justice, Court of Appeals of Texas

Linda Thomas was a Justice of the Court of Appeals of Texas, who joined the court in 1987. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1987–2009 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1987	Court of Appeals of Texas	–	–

Education

Southern Methodist University

Judicial Record

In our data, Thomas authored 692 published opinions for the court (1960–2010), plus 7 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: Johnson v. State (607 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. 103 of these were attributed to Thomas 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
1994	Johnson v. State	885 S.W.2d 641	607
1998	Wright v. State	969 S.W.2d 588	369
1987	Perry v. Kroger Stores, Store No. 119	741 S.W.2d 533	131
1989	Priest v. Texas Animal Health Commission	780 S.W.2d 874	117
1992	Ray v. Burns	832 S.W.2d 431	115
1991	Birdo v. Ament	814 S.W.2d 808	115
2000	Dallas Independent School District v. Finlan	27 S.W.3d 220	112
2004	Bates v. State	155 S.W.3d 212	110
1987	Greenstein, Logan & Co. v. Burgess Marketing, Inc.	744 S.W.2d 170	109
2008	In the Interest of C.R.†	263 S.W.3d 368	107
2010	RSR Corp. v. Siegmund	309 S.W.3d 686	98
2000	Sims v. State	12 S.W.3d 499	94
1993	Cullen/Frost Bank of Dallas, N.A. v. Commonwealth Lloyd's Insurance Co.	852 S.W.2d 252	89
1996	Madden v. State	911 S.W.2d 236	86
1990	State Farm Lloyds, Inc. v. Williams	791 S.W.2d 542	86

Showing the 15 most-cited of 705 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 Court of Appeals of Texas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Linda Thomas on?: Linda Thomas was a Justice of the Court of Appeals of Texas.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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