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

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Supreme Court of Virginia / Joined 1972 / Served to 1988

Richard Harding Poff

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Richard Harding Poff was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1972. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1923–2011
Tenure: 1972–1988 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1972	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

University of Virginia-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Poff authored 356 published opinions for the court (1972–2000), plus 33 dissents and 20 concurrences. Most cited: Bowman v. State Bank of Keysville (335 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. 221 of these were attributed to Poff 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
1985	Bowman v. State Bank of Keysville· Concurrence†	331 S.E.2d 797	335
1980	Fore v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	265 S.E.2d 729	284
1984	Messina v. Burden· Concurrence†	321 S.E.2d 657	250
1985	Gazette, Inc. v. Harris· Concurrence†	325 S.E.2d 713	242
1986	Drew v. Commonwealth	338 S.E.2d 844	235
1978	Smith v. Commonwealth†	219 Va. 455	232
1974	Bates v. Devers	214 Va. 667	226
1984	Powers v. Commonwealth	316 S.E.2d 739	221
1985	Brown v. Lukhard· Dissent†	330 S.E.2d 84	189
1984	Essex v. Commonwealth· Concurrence†	322 S.E.2d 216	189
1987	Gray v. Commonwealth	356 S.E.2d 157	185
1976	Bassett Furniture Industries, Inc. v. McReynolds†	216 Va. 897	150
1977	Whittaker v. Commonwealth	217 Va. 966	148
1983	First Virginia Bank-Colonial v. Baker†	301 S.E.2d 8	135
1983	Lewis v. Commonwealth†	303 S.E.2d 890	131

Showing the 15 most-cited of 409 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 Virginia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was Richard Harding Poff on?: Richard Harding Poff was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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