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 1942 / Served to 1972

Thomas S. Lawson

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Thomas S. Lawson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1942. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1906 · age 120
Tenure: 1942–1972 · 29 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1942	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Lawson authored 1,018 published opinions for the court (1942–1974), plus 35 dissents and 24 concurrences. Most cited: Duncan v. State (230 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. 533 of these were attributed to Lawson 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
1965	Duncan v. State	176 So. 2d 840	230
1946	Phillips v. State	28 So. 2d 542	148
1957	Liberty National Life Insurance Company v. Weldon	100 So. 2d 696	112
1968	Smith v. State	210 So. 2d 826	105
1950	Stokley v. State	49 So. 2d 284	104
1960	Aaron v. State	122 So. 2d 360	99
1947	Brasher v. State	30 So. 2d 31	99
1946	Griffin Lumber Co. v. Harper	25 So. 2d 505	95
1953	Smarr v. State	68 So. 2d 6	86
1970	Seibold v. State· Concurrence†	253 So. 2d 302	82
1968	Embrey v. State	214 So. 2d 567	77
1961	Ball v. Jones· Dissent†	132 So. 2d 120	76
1965	Sanders v. State	179 So. 2d 35	74
1968	Seals v. State	213 So. 2d 645	72
1955	Fikes v. State· Concurrence†	81 So. 2d 303	72

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,081 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 Thomas S. Lawson on?: Thomas S. Lawson 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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29 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).