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 1974 / Served to 1987

Ray L. Brock Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

Ray L. Brock Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1922–2001
Tenure: 1974–1987 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1974	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Education

Duke University

Judicial Record

In our data, Brock authored 336 published opinions for the court (1974–1988), plus 39 dissents and 37 concurrences. Most cited: Hellard v. State (1,516 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. 234 of these were attributed to Brock 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
1982	Hellard v. State	629 S.W.2d 4	1,516
1983	State v. Williams· Concurrence†	657 S.W.2d 405	1,043
1978	State v. Banks	564 S.W.2d 947	765
1978	State v. Grear	568 S.W.2d 285	714
1977	State v. MacKey	553 S.W.2d 337	586
1982	State v. Melson· Concurrence†	638 S.W.2d 342	438
1975	State v. Thompson	519 S.W.2d 789	360
1984	State v. Buck· Concurrence†	670 S.W.2d 600	260
1985	State v. Williams	690 S.W.2d 517	252
1983	Lawrence Ex Rel. Powell v. Stanford	655 S.W.2d 927	244
1983	State v. Hammersley	650 S.W.2d 352	219
1981	State v. Dicks· Concurrence†	615 S.W.2d 126	214
1980	State v. Kelly	603 S.W.2d 726	211
1980	Bunch v. State	605 S.W.2d 227	187
1978	Memphis Publishing Co. v. Nichols	569 S.W.2d 412	170

Showing the 15 most-cited of 412 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 Ray L. Brock Jr. on?: Ray L. Brock Jr. 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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13 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).