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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Kentucky / Joined 1991 / Served to 1995

Thomas B. Spain

Justice, Supreme Court of Kentucky

Thomas B. Spain was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky, who joined the court in 1991. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1928–2012
Tenure: 1991–1995 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1991	Supreme Court of Kentucky	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Spain authored 60 published opinions for the court (1991–1995), plus 24 dissents and 13 concurrences. Most cited: Foster v. Commonwealth (106 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. 59 of these were attributed to Spain 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
1992	Foster v. Commonwealth	827 S.W.2d 670	106
1992	Funk v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	842 S.W.2d 476	99
1993	Coots v. Allstate Insurance Co.· Concurrence†	853 S.W.2d 895	98
1991	Snodgrass v. Commonwealth	814 S.W.2d 579	84
1992	Morganfield National Bank v. Damien Elder & Sons· Dissent†	836 S.W.2d 893	83
1991	Ranier v. Mount Sterling National Bank	812 S.W.2d 154	66
1995	Webb v. Commonwealth†	904 S.W.2d 226	65
1993	Alexander v. Commonwealth· Concurrence†	862 S.W.2d 856	61
1992	Commonwealth v. Snodgrass	831 S.W.2d 176	56
1994	Simpson v. Commonwealth	889 S.W.2d 781	50
1995	Greathouse v. Shreve· Dissent†	891 S.W.2d 387	49
1991	Peabody Coal Co. v. Gossett	819 S.W.2d 33	48
1992	Hellstrom v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	825 S.W.2d 612	46
1994	McGinnis v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	875 S.W.2d 518	44
1993	Allstate Insurance Co. v. Dicke· Dissent†	862 S.W.2d 327	44

Showing the 15 most-cited of 97 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 Kentucky reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Thomas B. Spain on?: Thomas B. Spain was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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