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 1953 / Served to 1976

Pelham J. Merrill

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Pelham J. Merrill was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1953. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1907 · age 119
Tenure: 1953–1976 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1953	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Merrill authored 995 published opinions for the court (1953–1976), plus 22 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Aland v. Graham (143 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. 508 of these were attributed to Merrill 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
1971	Aland v. Graham	250 So. 2d 677	143
1975	Jackson v. City of Florence· Dissent†	320 So. 2d 68	141
1974	League of Women Voters v. Renfro	290 So. 2d 167	116
1958	Nichols v. State	100 So. 2d 750	113
1960	Aaron v. State· Dissent†	122 So. 2d 360	99
1973	Johnson v. Shenandoah Life Insurance Company	281 So. 2d 636	92
1969	Willcutt v. State	226 So. 2d 328	91
1970	Safeco Insurance Co. of America v. Jones	243 So. 2d 736	85
1967	Harris v. State	195 So. 2d 521	80
1973	Horne v. Patton· Concurrence†	287 So. 2d 824	79
1960	Espey v. State	120 So. 2d 904	76
1974	Eich v. Town of Gulf Shores· Dissent†	300 So. 2d 354	75
1961	Aaron v. State	139 So. 2d 309	75
1975	Alabama Power Company v. Mosley	318 So. 2d 260	72
1967	Elrod v. State	202 So. 2d 539	69

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,024 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 Pelham J. Merrill on?: Pelham J. Merrill 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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23 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).