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 1966 / Served to 1990

William J. Harbison

Justice, Supreme Court of Tennessee

William J. Harbison was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1966. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1923–1993
Tenure: 1966–1990 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1966	Supreme Court of Tennessee	–	–

Education

Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University

Judicial Record

In our data, Harbison authored 380 published opinions for the court (1966–1990), plus 20 dissents and 11 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Cabbage (3,699 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. 230 of these were attributed to Harbison 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
1978	State v. Cabbage	571 S.W.2d 832	3,699
1989	State v. Melson	772 S.W.2d 417	868
1975	Evco Corporation v. Ross	528 S.W.2d 20	202
1974	Teeters v. Currey· Concurrence†	518 S.W.2d 512	160
1978	Combustion Engineering, Inc. v. Kennedy	562 S.W.2d 202	157
1987	Humphrey v. David Witherspoon, Inc.	734 S.W.2d 315	153
1978	Fowler v. Happy Goodman Family	575 S.W.2d 496	144
1975	State v. Black	524 S.W.2d 913	141
1981	State v. Knight	616 S.W.2d 593	138
1988	Chism v. Mid-South Milling Co., Inc.	762 S.W.2d 552	133
1979	Miller v. State· Dissent†	584 S.W.2d 758	132
1987	State v. Mahler	735 S.W.2d 226	127
1986	State v. Goad	707 S.W.2d 846	126
1979	Cozzolino v. State· Dissent†	584 S.W.2d 765	121
1989	State v. Cravens	764 S.W.2d 754	119

Showing the 15 most-cited of 411 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 J. Harbison on?: William J. Harbison 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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24 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).