How do judges of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals / Joined 1951 / Served to 1976

William Arthur Morrison

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

William Arthur Morrison was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1951. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1909 · age 117
Tenure: 1951–1976 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1951	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Morrison authored 2,728 published opinions for the court (1951–1976), plus 147 dissents and 117 concurrences. Most cited: Albrecht v. State (705 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. 2,022 of these were attributed to Morrison 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
1972	Albrecht v. State· Concurrence†	486 S.W.2d 97	705
1976	Day v. State· Concurrence†	532 S.W.2d 302	359
1975	Jurek v. State	522 S.W.2d 934	238
1964	Ex Parte Caldwell	383 S.W.2d 587	217
1969	Brumfield v. State	445 S.W.2d 732	200
1969	Olson v. State· Concurrence†	484 S.W.2d 756	176
1967	Hullum v. State· Dissent†	415 S.W.2d 192	166
1961	Gaskin v. State	353 S.W.2d 467	154
1964	Quarles v. State	385 S.W.2d 395	150
1975	Burrell v. State· Concurrence†	526 S.W.2d 799	148
1972	Hopkins v. State· Concurrence†	480 S.W.2d 212	145
1976	Smith v. State	540 S.W.2d 693	143
1972	Tezeno v. State· Concurrence†	484 S.W.2d 374	113
1975	Halliburton v. State· Separate†	528 S.W.2d 216	112
1974	Thompson v. State· Dissent†	521 S.W.2d 621	109

Showing the 15 most-cited of 3,327 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 Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was William Arthur Morrison on?: William Arthur Morrison was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

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 Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).