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 1990

Robert E. Cooper

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

Robert E. Cooper was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1920 · age 106
Tenure: 1974–1990 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Vanderbilt University

Judicial Record

In our data, Cooper authored 306 published opinions for the court (1974–1990), plus 3 dissents. Most cited: State v. Tuggle (3,884 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. 166 of these were attributed to Cooper 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	State v. Tuggle	639 S.W.2d 913	3,884
1985	State v. Duncan	698 S.W.2d 63	462
1989	State v. Jacumin	778 S.W.2d 430	311
1978	State v. Burkhart	566 S.W.2d 871	260
1981	State v. Dicks	615 S.W.2d 126	214
1980	Houston v. State	593 S.W.2d 267	128
1984	Southern Railway Co. v. State Board of Equalization	682 S.W.2d 196	127
1988	State v. Porterfield	746 S.W.2d 441	124
1986	State v. King	718 S.W.2d 241	124
1985	State v. Zagorski	701 S.W.2d 808	121
1979	Cozzolino v. State	584 S.W.2d 765	121
1981	State v. Harrington	627 S.W.2d 345	114
1990	State v. Griffith	787 S.W.2d 340	111
1976	Edwards v. State	540 S.W.2d 641	109
1981	State v. Strouth	620 S.W.2d 467	106

Showing the 15 most-cited of 309 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 Robert E. Cooper on?: Robert E. Cooper 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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16 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).