How do judges of the Rhode Island Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Rhode Island Supreme Court / Joined 1881 / Former Justice

Pardon Tillinghast

Justice, Rhode Island Supreme Court

Pardon Tillinghast was a Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1881. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1836 · age 190
Tenure: 1881 · 145 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1881	Rhode Island Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Brown University

Judicial Record

In our data, Tillinghast authored 368 published opinions for the court (1882–1905), plus 11 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Request of William H. Caswell (86 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. 6 of these were attributed to Tillinghast 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
1893	Request of William H. Caswell	29 A. 259	86
1900	State v. Dalton	46 A. 234	31
1900	State v. Foster	46 A. 833	28
1897	State v. Baker	38 A. 653	28
1898	Hopkins v. Drowne	41 A. 567	26
1902	McGarr v. National & Providence Worsted Mills	53 A. 320	25
1901	Murray v. State Mutual Life Insurance	48 A. 800	24
1896	Town of Bristol v. Bristol & Warren Water Works	34 A. 359	24
1897	Grosvenor v. Flint	37 A. 304	23
1898	State v. Ballou	40 A. 861	21
1897	J.A. R.A. Reid v. Prov. Journal Co.	37 A. 637	20
1903	State v. Epstein	55 A. 204	19
1902	Carll v. Interstate Consolidated R.R. Co.	51 A. 305	19
1893	State v. Hull	26 A. 191	19
1891	Cadwalader v. Bailey	23 A. 20	19

Showing the 15 most-cited of 387 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 Rhode Island Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Pardon Tillinghast on?: Pardon Tillinghast was a Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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