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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Texas / Joined 2005 / Former Justice

Phil Johnson

Justice, Supreme Court of Texas

Phil Johnson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, who joined the court in 2005. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1944 · age 82
Tenure: 2005 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

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

Judicial Record

In our data, Johnson authored 82 published opinions for the court (2006–2018), plus 33 dissents and 19 concurrences. Most cited: Mann Frankfort Stein & Lipp Advisors, Inc. v. Fielding (1,889 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. 94 of these were attributed to Johnson 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
2009	Mann Frankfort Stein & Lipp Advisors, Inc. v. Fielding	289 S.W.3d 844	1,889
2006	MacK Trucks, Inc. v. Tamez	206 S.W.3d 572	1,656
2006	Tony Gullo Motors I, L.P. and Brien Garcia v. Nury Chapa· Concurrence†	212 S.W.3d 299	1,196
2008	City of Rockwall v. Hughes	246 S.W.3d 621	1,171
2007	Moki Mac River Expeditions v. Drugg· Dissent†	221 S.W.3d 569	848
2006	Reata Construction Corp. v. City of Dallas	197 S.W.3d 371	710
2008	Perry Homes v. Cull· Concurrence†	258 S.W.3d 580	603
2009	In Re Labatt Food Service, L.P.	279 S.W.3d 640	592
2010	Texas Lottery Commission v. First State Bank of DeQueen	325 S.W.3d 628	589
2006	Marshall v. Housing Authority of San Antonio	198 S.W.3d 782	563
2013	Homer Merriman v. Xto Energy, Inc.†	407 S.W.3d 244	540
2010	Gilbert Texas Construction, L.P. v. Underwriters at Lloyd's London	327 S.W.3d 118	497
2012	Rusk State Hospital v. Black†	392 S.W.3d 88	489
2010	Del Lago Partners, Inc. v. Smith· Dissent†	307 S.W.3d 762	485
2017	First United Pentecostal Church of Beaumont v. Parker†	514 S.W.3d 214	447

Showing the 15 most-cited of 134 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 Texas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Phil Johnson on?: Phil Johnson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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