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 1853 / Served to 1859

Samuel F. Rice

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Samuel F. Rice was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1853. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1816 · age 210
Tenure: 1853–1859 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1853	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Rice authored 173 published opinions for the court (1855–1937), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: Ogletree v. State (59 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. 173 of these were attributed to Rice 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
1856	Ogletree v. State†	28 Ala. 693	59
1856	Johnson v. State†	29 Ala. 62	38
1856	West v. Hendrix†	28 Ala. 226	38
1855	McCauley v. State†	26 Ala. 135	38
1856	Huffman v. State†	29 Ala. 40	34
1856	McCreary v. Turk†	29 Ala. 244	32
1856	Hunt v. Acre†	28 Ala. 580	30
1855	Elliott v. State†	26 Ala. 78	27
1855	Duramus v. Harrison†	26 Ala. 326	27
1856	Grady v. Robinson†	28 Ala. 289	26
1857	Armstrong's Ex'r v. Armstrong's Heirs†	29 Ala. 538	24
1856	Ex parte Robbins†	29 Ala. 71	24
1858	Farrall v. State†	32 Ala. 557	23
1855	Spivey v. State†	26 Ala. 90	23
1855	Moore v. Appleton†	26 Ala. 633	23

Showing the 15 most-cited of 174 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 F. Rice on?: Samuel F. Rice 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

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

6 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).