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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Mississippi / Joined 1984 / Active

Michael D. Sullivan

Associate Justice, Supreme Court of Mississippi

Michael D. Sullivan is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, serving since 1984. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1938–2000
Tenure: Since 1984 · 42 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1984	Supreme Court of Mississippi	–	–

Education

University of Southern Mississippi		1960
Tulane University of Louisiana		1966
University of Virginia-Main Campus		1988

Judicial Record

In our data, Sullivan authored 197 published opinions for the court (1984–2000), plus 6 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Billiot v. State (479 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. 109 of these were attributed to Sullivan 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
1984	Billiot v. State	454 So. 2d 445	479
1987	Williamson v. State	512 So. 2d 868	321
1989	Williams v. State	544 So. 2d 782	318
1988	Pinkney v. State	538 So. 2d 329	316
1989	Davis v. State· Concurrence†	551 So. 2d 165	289
1992	Abram v. State	606 So. 2d 1015	286
1998	Underwood v. State	708 So. 2d 18	282
1997	Lester v. State	692 So. 2d 755	278
1992	Clemons v. State	593 So. 2d 1004	252
1997	Wilcher v. State· Dissent†	697 So. 2d 1087	242
1992	Pinkney v. State	602 So. 2d 1177	216
1992	Jones v. State	602 So. 2d 1170	208
1996	Aetna Cas. and Sur. Co. v. Berry	669 So. 2d 56	197
1992	Parker v. State†	606 So. 2d 1132	153
1999	Weatherspoon v. State	732 So. 2d 158	147

Showing the 15 most-cited of 210 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 Mississippi reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court is Michael D. Sullivan on?: Michael D. Sullivan is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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