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 2016 / Active

Stephen R. McCullough

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

Stephen R. McCullough is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, serving since 2016. He previously served on the Court of Appeals of Virginia. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2016 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2011	Court of Appeals of Virginia	–	–
2016	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McCullough authored 80 published opinions for the court (2011–2019), plus 3 concurrences. Most cited: Richard Alvin Otey v. Commonwealth of Virginia (126 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. 82 of these were attributed to McCullough 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
2012	Richard Alvin Otey v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	61 Va. App. 346	126
2015	Alexy J. Abdo, a/k/a Alexi J. Abdo v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	64 Va. App. 468	91
2012	Burke v. Catawba Hospital	722 S.E.2d 684	72
2017	Palmer v. Atl. Coast Pipeline, LLC· Concurrence†	801 S.E.2d 414	55
2016	Johnson, Ronald v. Commonwealth†	793 S.E.2d 321	52
2013	Steve Whitt v. Commonwealth of Virginia· Separate†	61 Va. App. 637	43
2015	Tevein Dewayne Harvey v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	65 Va. App. 280	39
2013	Joseph A. Wiencko, Jr. v. Akemi Takayama†	62 Va. App. 217	35
2013	Lashon Marcay Pritchett v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	61 Va. App. 777	33
2018	Commonwealth v. Gregg†	811 S.E.2d 254	32
2012	Faysal M. Zedan v. Sylvie E. Westheim†	60 Va. App. 556	32
2015	Bindu Bajgain v. Devendra Bajgain†	64 Va. App. 439	30
2018	Commonwealth v. Giddens†	816 S.E.2d 290	28
2011	Driscoll v. Hunter	716 S.E.2d 477	28
2016	Pike v. Hagaman†	787 S.E.2d 89	27

Showing the 15 most-cited of 87 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 is Stephen R. McCullough on?: Stephen R. McCullough is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

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10 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).