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 1981 / Served to 1997

Roscoe B. Stephenson Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Roscoe B. Stephenson Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1981. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1922–2011
Tenure: 1981–1997 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1981	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

Washington and Lee University
Washington and Lee University

Judicial Record

In our data, Stephenson authored 393 published opinions for the court (1981–2009), plus 32 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: Clay v. Commonwealth (347 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. 169 of these were attributed to Stephenson 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
2001	Clay v. Commonwealth	546 S.E.2d 728	347
1983	LeVasseur v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	304 S.E.2d 644	272
1984	Stockton v. Commonwealth†	314 S.E.2d 371	259
1990	Cheng v. Commonwealth	393 S.E.2d 599	243
1984	Winn v. Aleda Const. Co., Inc.†	315 S.E.2d 193	240
1987	Duggin v. Adams	360 S.E.2d 832	214
1989	Etheridge v. Medical Center Hospitals†	376 S.E.2d 525	201
1986	Barrett v. Commonwealth	341 S.E.2d 190	195
1987	Fox v. Deese†	362 S.E.2d 699	175
1991	Jimenez v. Commonwealth	402 S.E.2d 678	170
1998	Walton v. Commonwealth	497 S.E.2d 869	169
1986	Lowe v. Richmond Dept. of Public Welfare	343 S.E.2d 70	166
1995	Commercial Business Systems, Inc. v. BellSouth Services, Inc.	453 S.E.2d 261	165
1992	Cable v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	415 S.E.2d 218	158
1986	Coe v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	340 S.E.2d 820	150

Showing the 15 most-cited of 434 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 Roscoe B. Stephenson Jr. on?: Roscoe B. Stephenson Jr. 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).