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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Court of Appeals of Tennessee / Joined 1999 / Active

Michael D. Swiney

Judge, Court of Appeals of Tennessee

Michael D. Swiney is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee, serving since 1999. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1999 · 27 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1999	Court of Appeals of Tennessee	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Swiney authored 1,221 published opinions for the court (1998–2025), plus 3 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: Manis v. Manis (118 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. 31 of these were attributed to Swiney 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
2001	Manis v. Manis	49 S.W.3d 295	118
2000	B & G Construction, Inc. v. Polk	37 S.W.3d 462	107
2005	Morton v. Morton	182 S.W.3d 821	93
2014	Bobby Murray v. Dennis Miracle	457 S.W.3d 399	86
2001	Huntley v. Huntley	61 S.W.3d 329	85
2008	Pippin v. Pippin	277 S.W.3d 398	80
2002	Arfken & Associates, P.A. v. Simpson Bridge Co.· Dissent†	85 S.W.3d 789	76
2001	Nelson v. Nelson†	66 S.W.3d 896	72
2001	Pyburn v. Bill Heard Chevrolet	63 S.W.3d 351	70
2004	Moody v. Hutchison	159 S.W.3d 15	64
2002	Jones v. Bureau of TennCare	94 S.W.3d 495	63
2004	Robinson v. Currey	153 S.W.3d 32	61
2003	Chambliss v. Stohler	124 S.W.3d 116	58
2007	C & W ASSET ACQUISITION, LLC, as Assignee of Chrysler First Financial Services Corporation v. Donald H. OGGS	230 S.W.3d 671	57
1999	Waller v. Bryan	16 S.W.3d 770	55

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,229 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 Tennessee reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court is Michael D. Swiney on?: Michael D. Swiney is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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