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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Court of Appeals of Tennessee / Joined 1982 / Served to 2008

William Frank Crawford

Judge, Court of Appeals of Tennessee

William Frank Crawford was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1982. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1982–2008 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Court of Appeals of Tennessee	–	–

Education

Union Institute & University

Judicial Record

In our data, Crawford authored 848 published opinions for the court (1982–2008), plus 2 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Whitaker v. Whitaker (354 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. 195 of these were attributed to Crawford 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
1997	Whitaker v. Whitaker	957 S.W.2d 834	354
2000	Whitaker v. Whirlpool Corp.	32 S.W.3d 222	291
1997	Paehler v. Union Planters National Bank, Inc.	971 S.W.2d 393	171
1995	Kincaid v. Kincaid	912 S.W.2d 140	154
1993	Koch v. Koch	874 S.W.2d 571	150
1992	Rainey v. Stansell	836 S.W.2d 117	150
1983	Ballard v. North American Life & Casualty Co.	667 S.W.2d 79	128
1998	Shahrdar v. Global Housing, Inc.	983 S.W.2d 230	124
1999	Watters v. Watters	22 S.W.3d 817	106
2007	Riggs v. Riggs	250 S.W.3d 453	100
1994	Leek v. Powell	884 S.W.2d 118	98
1984	Austin v. City of Memphis	684 S.W.2d 624	97
1995	Smith v. Smith	912 S.W.2d 155	90
1997	Umstot v. Umstot	968 S.W.2d 819	87
1997	Lindsey v. Lindsey	976 S.W.2d 175	84

Showing the 15 most-cited of 854 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 Court of Appeals of Tennessee reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was William Frank Crawford on?: William Frank Crawford was a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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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25 years on the Court of Appeals of Tennessee. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).