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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Supreme Court of Tennessee / Joined 1973 / Served to 1990

William Fones

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

William Fones was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1973. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1917–2010
Tenure: 1973–1990 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1973	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Education

University of Memphis

Judicial Record

In our data, Fones authored 432 published opinions for the court (1973–1996), plus 34 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Sheffield (1,460 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. 251 of these were attributed to Fones 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
1984	State v. Sheffield	676 S.W.2d 542	1,460
1977	State v. Brown	551 S.W.2d 329	598
1978	State v. Hatchett	560 S.W.2d 627	354
1988	State v. Preston	759 S.W.2d 647	340
1976	Gray v. State	538 S.W.2d 391	309
1985	State v. Parton	694 S.W.2d 299	291
1984	State v. Buck	670 S.W.2d 600	260
1978	State v. Sutton	562 S.W.2d 820	222
1990	State v. Adkins· Concurrence†	786 S.W.2d 642	216
1975	Cornpropst v. Sloan	528 S.W.2d 188	195
1973	Burlison v. State	501 S.W.2d 801	185
1975	Farmers-Peoples Bank v. Clemmer	519 S.W.2d 801	177
1975	Smith v. State	527 S.W.2d 737	169
1979	Delk v. State	590 S.W.2d 435	161
1978	Simpson v. Satterfield	564 S.W.2d 953	160

Showing the 15 most-cited of 472 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 Tennessee reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was William Fones on?: William Fones was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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