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 1868 / Served to 1874

Thomas M. Peters

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Thomas M. Peters was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama (9 judges, selected by partisan election), who joined the court in 1868. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1810 · age 216
Tenure: 1868–1874 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1868	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Peters authored 329 published opinions for the court (1869–1874), plus 7 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Sanders v. Cabaniss (47 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. 341 of these were attributed to Peters 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
1869	Sanders v. Cabaniss· Concurrence†	43 Ala. 173	47
1874	Lewis v. State†	51 Ala. 1	38
1870	Turner v. Turner†	44 Ala. 437	38
1872	Commissioners Court v. Rather†	48 Ala. 433	29
1872	Lockhart v. City of Troy†	48 Ala. 579	28
1871	O'Neal v. Robinson†	45 Ala. 526	25
1874	Beasley v. State†	50 Ala. 149	24
1874	Moody v. Bibb†	50 Ala. 245	23
1874	Goldthwaite v. City Council†	50 Ala. 486	23
1874	Wade v. State†	50 Ala. 164	21
1874	Rowland & Co. v. Plummer†	50 Ala. 182	21
1871	Hawkins v. Hudson†	45 Ala. 482	21
1870	Wicks v. State†	44 Ala. 398	20
1873	Ex parte North†	49 Ala. 385	18
1872	Barbour County v. Horn†	48 Ala. 566	18

Showing the 15 most-cited of 342 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 M. Peters on?: Thomas M. Peters 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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6 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).