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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Alabama / Joined 2005 / Served to 2011

Patricia M. Smith

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Patricia M. Smith was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 2005. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2005–2011 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2005	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

Faulkner University

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 147 published opinions for the court (2005–2010), plus 2 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: T.V. v. B.S. (158 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. 57 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
2007	T.V. v. B.S.· Dissent†	971 So. 2d 1	158
2005	Fadalla v. Fadalla	929 So. 2d 429	134
2006	Ex Parte Estate of Reynolds	946 So. 2d 450	125
2007	Ex Parte Essary	992 So. 2d 5	118
2008	Alabama Dept. of Transp. v. Harbert Intern., Inc.	990 So. 2d 831	84
2006	Ex Parte Town of Lowndesboro	950 So. 2d 1203	69
2005	Ex Parte City of Tuskegee	932 So. 2d 895	65
2008	E.W.H. v. A.M.P.· Concurrence†	997 So. 2d 1008	55
2009	Southland Bank v. a & a Drywall Supply Co.	21 So. 3d 1196	54
2006	Prince v. Poole	935 So. 2d 431	54
2005	Ex Parte Walker	928 So. 2d 259	54
2008	Ex Parte Indiana Mills & Mfg., Inc.	10 So. 3d 536	43
2009	M.D.C. v. K.D.· Concurrence†	39 So. 3d 1117	42
2005	Ex Parte McCormick	932 So. 2d 124	42
2006	Bockman v. WCH, LLC	943 So. 2d 789	40

Showing the 15 most-cited of 164 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 Alabama reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Patricia M. Smith on?: Patricia M. Smith was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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