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 1976 / Served to 1989

Samuel A. Beatty

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Samuel A. Beatty was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1976. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1923 · age 103
Tenure: 1976–1989 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1976	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

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

Judicial Record

In our data, Beatty authored 973 published opinions for the court (1976–2000), plus 61 dissents and 30 concurrences. Most cited: Ex Parte Faircloth (319 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. 379 of these were attributed to Beatty 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
1985	Ex Parte Faircloth	471 So. 2d 493	319
1980	American Road Serv. Co. v. Inmon	394 So. 2d 361	291
1986	Ex Parte Terry	494 So. 2d 628	273
1986	Hall v. Mazzone	486 So. 2d 408	252
1982	National SEC. Fire & Cas. Co. v. Bowen	417 So. 2d 179	229
1985	Ex Parte Grayson	479 So. 2d 76	207
1983	Ex Parte Womack	435 So. 2d 766	205
1987	Hoffman-La Roche, Inc. v. Campbell	512 So. 2d 725	182
1985	Ex Parte Boatwright	471 So. 2d 1257	168
1981	Gulf Atlantic Life Ins. Co. v. Barnes	405 So. 2d 916	153
1988	Bowden v. State	538 So. 2d 1226	109
1985	Ex Parte Arthur	472 So. 2d 665	103
1985	Bank of Red Bay v. King	482 So. 2d 274	102
1982	Ex Parte Berryhill	410 So. 2d 416	100
1985	Smith v. Clark	468 So. 2d 138	95

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,065 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 Samuel A. Beatty on?: Samuel A. Beatty 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).