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 1995 / Served to 2006

William Graves

Justice, Supreme Court of Kentucky

William Graves was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky, who joined the court in 1995. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1935 · age 91
Tenure: 1995–2006 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	Supreme Court of Kentucky	–	–

Education

University of Notre Dame
University of Kentucky

Judicial Record

In our data, Graves authored 142 published opinions for the court (1996–2006), plus 57 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: Springer v. Commonwealth (185 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. 141 of these were attributed to Graves 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	Springer v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	998 S.W.2d 439	185
2001	Stopher v. Commonwealth	57 S.W.3d 787	169
2004	Stringer v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.· Dissent†	151 S.W.3d 781	149
1996	Partin v. Commonwealth	918 S.W.2d 219	139
1997	Bowling v. Commonwealth	942 S.W.2d 293	131
1998	Adcock v. Commonwealth	967 S.W.2d 6	121
2001	Farmland Mutual Insurance Co. v. Johnson· Dissent†	36 S.W.3d 368	96
1997	Kovacs v. Freeman	957 S.W.2d 251	86
2000	Magic Coal Co. v. Fox· Dissent†	19 S.W.3d 88	82
1997	Collins v. Commonwealth	951 S.W.2d 569	74
2005	Farmers Bank & Trust Co. of Georgetown v. Willmott Hardwoods, Inc.	171 S.W.3d 4	73
2002	Furnish v. Commonwealth†	95 S.W.3d 34	72
1997	Foley v. Commonwealth	942 S.W.2d 876	71
2000	Price v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	31 S.W.3d 885	70
1998	Bowling v. Commonwealth	981 S.W.2d 545	69

Showing the 15 most-cited of 214 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 Graves on?: William Graves 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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11 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).