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 1960 / Served to 1964

Sam L. Felts

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

Sam L. Felts was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1960. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1889 · age 137
Tenure: 1960–1964 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1960	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Education

Samford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Felts authored 96 published opinions for the court (1960–1970), plus 1 dissent and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Carroll v. State (1,086 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. 29 of these were attributed to Felts 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
1963	Carroll v. State	370 S.W.2d 523	1,086
1961	Farmer v. State	343 S.W.2d 895	344
1964	State Ex Rel. Kuntz v. Bomar	381 S.W.2d 290	160
1963	State v. Fowler	373 S.W.2d 460	134
1963	State Ex Rel. Holbrook v. Bomar	364 S.W.2d 887	115
1962	Strader v. State	362 S.W.2d 224	114
1963	Poe v. State	370 S.W.2d 488	82
1960	Anderson v. State	341 S.W.2d 385	76
1962	Southeastern Aviation, Inc. v. Hurd	355 S.W.2d 436	59
1964	Harvey v. State	376 S.W.2d 497	53
1962	Harbison v. Briggs Bros. Paint Mfg. Co.	354 S.W.2d 464	50
1962	City of Nashville v. State Board of Equalization	360 S.W.2d 458	47
1960	Moss v. Fortune	340 S.W.2d 902	47
1963	West v. Carr	370 S.W.2d 469	46
1962	Bostick v. State	360 S.W.2d 472	42

Showing the 15 most-cited of 98 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 Sam L. Felts on?: Sam L. Felts 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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4 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).