How do judges of the Supreme Court of South Carolina reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Supreme Court of South Carolina / Joined 1912 / Served to 1930

Richard Cannon Watts

Justice, Supreme Court of South Carolina

Richard Cannon Watts was a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, who joined the court in 1912. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1853–1930
Tenure: 1912–1930 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1912	Supreme Court of South Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Watts authored 860 published opinions for the court (1900–1930), plus 101 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: State Ex Rel. Richards v. Moorer (73 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. 30 of these were attributed to Watts 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
1929	State Ex Rel. Richards v. Moorer· Dissent	150 S.E. 269	73
1926	Walker v. Queen Insurance Co.· Dissent	134 S.E. 263	38
1926	Citizens Bank v. Bradley, Examiner· Dissent	134 S.E. 510	36
1930	Piper v. American Fidelity & Casualty Co.· Dissent	154 S.E. 106	33
1927	Brasington v. Williams· Dissent	141 S.E. 375	33
1924	Jenkins v. Southern Railway Co.· Dissent	125 S.E. 912	32
1925	Citizens' Bank v. Heyward· Concurrence	133 S.E. 709	31
1923	Wheeler v. Globe & Rutgers Fire Ins.	118 S.E. 609	31
1922	State v. Mittle· Dissent	113 S.E. 335	31
1926	State v. Bigham	131 S.E. 603	30
1920	Prescott v. Hines, Director General	103 S.E. 543	28
1912	State Ex Rel. Lyon v. Bowden· Dissent	75 S.E. 866	28
1926	Miller, Administrator v. A.C.L.R. Co.	138 S.E. 675	26
1917	Merchants & Planters Bank v. Brigman	91 S.E. 332	25
1925	Barnwell v. Matthews	128 S.E. 712	24

Showing the 15 most-cited of 973 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 South Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was Richard Cannon Watts on?: Richard Cannon Watts was a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina.

Sources

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

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