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 1962 / Served to 1975

Robert B. Harwood

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Robert B. Harwood was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1962. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1902–1991
Tenure: 1962–1975 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1962	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama
The University of Alabama
The University of Alabama
The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Harwood authored 1,073 published opinions for the court (1945–1975), plus 11 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: Hall Motor Company v. Furman (102 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. 214 of these were attributed to Harwood 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
1970	Hall Motor Company v. Furman	234 So. 2d 37	102
1954	Wright v. State	79 So. 2d 66	85
1974	Morgan County Commission v. Powell	293 So. 2d 830	77
1965	Aldridge v. State	179 So. 2d 51	75
1962	New York Times Company v. Sullivan	144 So. 2d 25	75
1973	Geohagan v. General Motors Corp.	279 So. 2d 436	71
1947	McKee v. State	31 So. 2d 656	66
1967	Owens v. Owens	201 So. 2d 396	64
1971	State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance v. Cahoon	252 So. 2d 619	63
1973	Loch Ridge Construction Company, Inc. v. Barra	280 So. 2d 745	62
1970	Maring-Crawford Motor Co. v. Smith	233 So. 2d 484	62
1950	Fiorella v. City of Birmingham	48 So. 2d 761	58
1974	Bagby Elevator and Electric Company, Inc. v. McBride· Concurrence†	291 So. 2d 306	56
1965	Smith v. Richardson	171 So. 2d 96	56
1948	De Graaf v. State	37 So. 2d 130	56

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,090 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 Robert B. Harwood on?: Robert B. Harwood 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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13 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).