How do judges of the Rhode Island Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Rhode Island Supreme Court / Joined 1920 / Served to 1929

William Sweetland

Justice, Rhode Island Supreme Court

William Sweetland was a Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1920. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1856–1932
Tenure: 1920–1929 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1920	Rhode Island Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Brown University
Brown University

Judicial Record

In our data, Sweetland authored 323 published opinions for the court (1909–1929), plus 10 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: McAuslan v. McAuslan (62 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 of these were attributed to Sweetland 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
1912	McAuslan v. McAuslan	83 A. 837	62
1929	Heffernan v. Zoning Board of Review	144 A. 674	45
1925	Matarese v. Matarese	131 A. 198	44
1911	Humes Construction Co. v. Philadelphia Casualty Co.	79 A. 1	31
1918	Walsh v. River Spinning Company	103 A. 1025	24
1927	Abbott v. Public Utilities Commission	136 A. 490	22
1919	Sholovitz v. Noorigian	107 A. 94	21
1918	Raferty v. Reilly	102 A. 711	21
1912	Tillinghast v. Johnson	82 A. 788	21
1910	Peirce v. Palmer	77 A. 201	21
1922	Golden v. R. L. Greene Paper Co.	116 A. 579	20
1921	Hazard v. Board of Tax Commissioners	113 A. 469	20
1922	Atkinson v. Birmingham	116 A. 205	19
1919	State v. Vanasse	107 A. 85	19
1912	Vaill v. McPhail	83 A. 1075	19

Showing the 15 most-cited of 337 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 Rhode Island Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was William Sweetland on?: William Sweetland was a Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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