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

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Supreme Court of Virginia / Joined 1980 / Served to 1983

William Carrington Thompson

Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia

William Carrington Thompson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1915–2011
Tenure: 1980–1983 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Supreme Court of Virginia	–	–

Education

Hampden-Sydney College
University of Virginia-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Thompson authored 64 published opinions for the court (1850–1983), plus 9 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Parks v. Commonwealth (459 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. 73 of these were attributed to Thompson 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
1980	Parks v. Commonwealth†	270 S.E.2d 755	459
1982	Swisher v. Swisher & Craun†	223 Va. 499	144
1981	Black v. Commonwealth†	284 S.E.2d 608	120
1981	Justus v. Commonwealth†	283 S.E.2d 905	118
1983	Donahue v. Commonwealth†	300 S.E.2d 768	87
1981	Bassett v. Commonwealth†	284 S.E.2d 844	75
1980	Ayyildiz v. Kidd†	266 S.E.2d 108	68
1983	Deahl v. Winchester Department of Social Services†	299 S.E.2d 863	60
1981	Patterson v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	283 S.E.2d 212	53
1982	Moehring v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	223 Va. 564	52
1982	Carter v. Carter†	291 S.E.2d 218	50
1982	Brooks v. City of Newport News†	295 S.E.2d 801	49
1983	Winfield v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	301 S.E.2d 15	47
1980	Gray v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	265 S.E.2d 705	42
1983	Browning-Ferris, Inc. v. Commonwealth†	300 S.E.2d 603	41

Showing the 15 most-cited of 75 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 Virginia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was William Carrington Thompson on?: William Carrington Thompson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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