How do judges of the Supreme Court of Ohio reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Ohio / Joined 2003 / Active

Terrance O'Donnell

Justice, Supreme Court of Ohio

Terrance O'Donnell is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, serving since 2003. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1946 · age 80
Tenure: Since 2003 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Supreme Court of Ohio	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, O'Donnell authored 121 published opinions for the court (2004–2018), plus 104 dissents and 44 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Bonnell (Slip Opinion) (1,841 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. 269 of these were attributed to O'Donnell 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
2014	State v. Bonnell (Slip Opinion)†	2014 Ohio 3177	1,841
2010	State v. Johnson· Concurrence†	2010 Ohio 6314	966
2010	State v. Underwood· Dissent†	2010 Ohio 1	724
2014	State v. Quarterman (Slip Opinion)†	2014 Ohio 4034	582
2011	State v. Lang†	2011 Ohio 4215	509
2011	State v. Lester· Concurrence†	2011 Ohio 5204	501
2012	State v. Williams· Dissent†	2012 Ohio 5699	491
2012	State v. Williams†	2012 Ohio 5695	417
2010	State v. Bodyke· Concurrence†	2010 Ohio 2424	413
2012	Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. v. Schwartzwald†	2012 Ohio 5017	409
2011	State v. Williams· Dissent†	2011 OH 3374	406
2015	State v. Adams (Slip Opinion)· Concurrence†	2015 Ohio 3954	375
2009	State v. Singleton†	2009 Ohio 6434	346
2012	Anderson v. City of Massillon†	2012 Ohio 5711	298
2016	State v. Walker (Slip Opinion)· Dissent†	2016 Ohio 8295	255

Showing the 15 most-cited of 269 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 Ohio reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court is Terrance O'Donnell on?: Terrance O'Donnell is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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23 years on the Supreme Court of Ohio. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).