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 1961 / Served to 1974

Ross W. Dyer

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

Ross W. Dyer was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1961. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1911–1993
Tenure: 1961–1974 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1961	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Education

Cumberland University

Judicial Record

In our data, Dyer authored 214 published opinions for the court (1961–1981), plus 3 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Harrington v. State (306 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. 112 of these were attributed to Dyer 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
1965	Harrington v. State	385 S.W.2d 758	306
1973	State v. Bishop	493 S.W.2d 81	188
1964	Lazenby Ex Rel. Lazenby v. Universal Underwriters Insurance	383 S.W.2d 1	104
1970	Tartera v. Palumbo	453 S.W.2d 780	81
1965	Daugherty v. State	393 S.W.2d 739	67
1966	Clarke v. State	402 S.W.2d 863	64
1964	Bacon v. State	385 S.W.2d 107	64
1965	Harrison v. State	394 S.W.2d 713	57
1963	Gervin v. State	371 S.W.2d 449	54
1973	Applewhite v. Memphis State University	495 S.W.2d 190	50
1972	Winters v. Maxey	481 S.W.2d 755	48
1974	Terry v. Aetna Casualty and Surety Company	510 S.W.2d 509	45
1967	Langford v. Langford	421 S.W.2d 632	45
1967	Biggers v. State	411 S.W.2d 696	45
1963	Hoyt v. Hoyt	372 S.W.2d 300	43

Showing the 15 most-cited of 219 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 Ross W. Dyer on?: Ross W. Dyer 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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12 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).