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 1996 / Served to 2006

William S. Cooper

Justice, Supreme Court of Kentucky

William S. Cooper was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky, who joined the court in 1996. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1941 · age 85
Tenure: 1996–2006 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1996	Supreme Court of Kentucky	–	–

Education

University of Kentucky
University of Kentucky

Judicial Record

In our data, Cooper authored 212 published opinions for the court (1997–2006), plus 72 dissents and 60 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. English (1,274 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. 205 of these were attributed to Cooper 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
1999	Commonwealth v. English	993 S.W.2d 941	1,274
2001	Yanero v. Davis	65 S.W.3d 510	533
2004	Hoskins v. Maricle†	150 S.W.3d 1	335
1998	Tamme v. Commonwealth	973 S.W.2d 13	202
1999	Springer v. Commonwealth	998 S.W.2d 439	185
1998	Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp. v. Golightly	976 S.W.2d 409	181
1998	Yeoman v. Com., Health Policy Bd.· Concurrence†	983 S.W.2d 459	172
2003	Johnson v. Commonwealth†	105 S.W.3d 430	157
1997	Stringer v. Commonwealth†	956 S.W.2d 883	148
2003	Adkins v. Commonwealth	96 S.W.3d 779	146
2004	Soto v. Commonwealth	139 S.W.3d 827	139
2004	Brooks v. Lexington-Fayette Urban County Housing Authority· Dissent†	132 S.W.3d 790	132
2001	Fraser v. Commonwealth	59 S.W.3d 448	129
2000	Davidson v. American Freightways, Inc.	25 S.W.3d 94	127
1999	Motorists Mutual Insurance Co. v. Glass	996 S.W.2d 437	123

Showing the 15 most-cited of 344 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 William S. Cooper on?: William S. Cooper 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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10 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).