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 1993 / Served to 2001

Ralph D. Cook

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Ralph D. Cook was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1993. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1944 · age 82
Tenure: 1993–2001 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1993	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

Howard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Cook authored 410 published opinions for the court (1994–2026), plus 71 dissents and 43 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Property at 2018 Rainbow Drive (275 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. 206 of these were attributed to Cook 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
1999	State v. Property at 2018 Rainbow Drive	740 So. 2d 1025	275
1997	Hobson v. American Cast Iron Pipe Co.· Concurrence†	690 So. 2d 341	148
1999	Delchamps, Inc. v. Bryant· Concurrence†	738 So. 2d 824	147
1998	Ex Parte Dan Tucker Auto Sales, Inc.· Concurrence†	718 So. 2d 33	146
1998	Ex Parte McNaughton· Dissent†	728 So. 2d 592	133
1995	Southern Medical Health Systems, Inc. v. Vaughn	669 So. 2d 98	124
1996	Ex Parte Windsor	683 So. 2d 1042	99
1997	Ex Parte Dyess· Concurrence†	709 So. 2d 447	92
1998	Ex Parte Clark	728 So. 2d 1126	77
1997	Ex Parte Isbell	708 So. 2d 571	72
2001	American General Finance, Inc. v. Branch	793 So. 2d 738	68
1995	Franklin v. City of Huntsville	670 So. 2d 848	67
1998	Ex Parte First Family Financial Services· Dissent†	718 So. 2d 658	62
2000	Ex Parte Pressley	770 So. 2d 143	59
1998	Med Center Cars, Inc. v. Smith	727 So. 2d 9	59

Showing the 15 most-cited of 525 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 Ralph D. Cook on?: Ralph D. Cook 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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8 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).