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 1995 / Served to 1998

Terry L. Butts

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Terry L. Butts was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1995. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1944 · age 82
Tenure: 1995–1998 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Butts authored 121 published opinions for the court (1995–1998), plus 17 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Palm Harbor Homes, Inc. v. Crawford (206 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. 62 of these were attributed to Butts 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
1997	Palm Harbor Homes, Inc. v. Crawford	689 So. 2d 3	206
1995	Ex Parte Taylor	666 So. 2d 73	189
1997	Ex Parte Williams	710 So. 2d 1350	151
1997	Ex Parte Trawick	698 So. 2d 162	146
1996	Ex Parte Land	678 So. 2d 224	132
1998	Ex Parte Davis	718 So. 2d 1166	98
1997	Ex Parte Dyess· Dissent†	709 So. 2d 447	92
1998	Ex Parte Horton	711 So. 2d 979	87
1997	Evans v. Waddell	689 So. 2d 23	83
1995	Ex Parte Sockwell	675 So. 2d 38	82
1995	Ex Parte Agee	669 So. 2d 102	82
1996	Ex Parte Hutcherson· Dissent†	677 So. 2d 1205	67
1998	Allstar Homes, Inc. v. Waters	711 So. 2d 924	58
1998	Ex Parte Wood· Concurrence†	715 So. 2d 819	58
1995	Odom v. Hull	658 So. 2d 442	53

Showing the 15 most-cited of 148 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 Terry L. Butts on?: Terry L. Butts was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

Sources

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

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3 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).