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 1889 / Served to 1923

Thomas N. McClellan

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Thomas N. McClellan was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 1889. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1853 · age 173
Tenure: 1889–1923 · 34 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1889	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–
1906	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McClellan authored 1,676 published opinions for the court (1889–1923), plus 34 dissents and 20 concurrences. Most cited: Armstrong v. Montgomery Street Railway Co. (127 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. 1,731 of these were attributed to McClellan 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
1898	Armstrong v. Montgomery Street Railway Co.†	123 Ala. 233	127
1911	Jones v. State†	174 Ala. 53	121
1903	City Delivery Co. v. Henry†	139 Ala. 161	115
1911	Louisville & Nashville R. R. v. Holland†	173 Ala. 675	95
1907	Sweeney v. Tritsch†	151 Ala. 242	72
1913	McNeil v. Munson S. S. Lines†	184 Ala. 420	71
1908	Sparks v. McCreary†	156 Ala. 382	70
1889	Maxwell v. State†	89 Ala. 150	67
1898	Fuller v. State†	122 Ala. 32	66
1910	Woodson v. State†	170 Ala. 87	65
1892	Richmond & Danville Railroad v. Freeman†	97 Ala. 289	65
1891	Glass v. Memphis & Charleston Railroad†	94 Ala. 581	65
1916	McPherson v. State†	198 Ala. 5	64
1890	Ala. Great Southern Railroad v. Frazier†	93 Ala. 45	61
1897	Rogers v. State†	117 Ala. 9	60

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,733 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 N. McClellan on?: Thomas N. McClellan 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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34 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).