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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Supreme Court of Tennessee / Joined 1947 / Served to 1961

Pride Tomlinson

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

Pride Tomlinson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1947. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1890 · age 136
Tenure: 1947–1961 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1947	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Tomlinson authored 385 published opinions for the court (1946–1962), plus 12 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Hoover Motor Exp. Co. v. Railroad & Public Utilities Commission (129 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. 228 of these were attributed to Tomlinson 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
1953	Hoover Motor Exp. Co. v. Railroad & Public Utilities Commission· Dissent†	261 S.W.2d 233	129
1947	Simmons Et Ux. v. Evans Et Ux	206 S.W.2d 295	93
1950	Texas Co. v. Aycock	227 S.W.2d 41	70
1954	Toombs v. State	270 S.W.2d 649	66
1955	Hargrove v. State	281 S.W.2d 692	58
1949	Thornton v. RCA Service Co.†	188 Tenn. 644	55
1952	Henry v. White	250 S.W.2d 70	50
1954	Jackson v. Clark & Fay, Inc.	270 S.W.2d 389	49
1948	Cantrell v. Burnett & Henderson Co.†	187 Tenn. 552	48
1957	Hopson v. State	299 S.W.2d 11	46
1950	DAVIDSON COUNTY v. Elrod	232 S.W.2d 1	44
1956	Langford Ex Rel. Langford v. Vanderbilt University	287 S.W.2d 32	43
1951	Holly v. City of Elizabethton	241 S.W.2d 1001	42
1960	Harper v. State	334 S.W.2d 933	40
1960	Chapman Drug Company v. Chapman	341 S.W.2d 392	39

Showing the 15 most-cited of 400 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 Tennessee reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Pride Tomlinson on?: Pride Tomlinson was a Justice of the Supreme Court 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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14 years on the Supreme Court of Tennessee. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).