How do judges of the Supreme Court of Texas reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Texas / Joined 1945 / Served to 1950

William M. Taylor

Justice, Supreme Court of Texas

William M. Taylor was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, who joined the court in 1945. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1876 · age 150
Tenure: 1945–1950 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1945	Supreme Court of Texas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Taylor authored 171 published opinions for the court (1935–1950), plus 5 dissents. Most cited: Farmers' Seed & Gin Co. v. Brooks (131 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. 13 of these were attributed to Taylor 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
1935	Farmers' Seed & Gin Co. v. Brooks	81 S.W.2d 675	131
1939	Wright v. Traders & General Insurance	123 S.W.2d 314	116
1942	Southland Life Insurance v. Greenwade	159 S.W.2d 854	113
1947	Texas & New Orleans Railroad v. Burden· Dissent†	146 Tex. 109	108
1935	Wichita Falls Traction Co. v. Elliott	81 S.W.2d 659	92
1947	Burford v. Pounders	199 S.W.2d 141	88
1945	Myers v. Thomas	186 S.W.2d 811	87
1950	Blanks v. Southland Hotel, Inc.	229 S.W.2d 357	85
1936	Southland Greyhound Lines, Inc. v. Cotten	91 S.W.2d 326	80
1948	Matney v. Odom	210 S.W.2d 980	78
1948	Crow v. City of Corpus Christi	209 S.W.2d 922	74
1948	Banker v. McLaughlin	208 S.W.2d 843	72
1943	City of Houston v. State Ex Rel West University Place	176 S.W.2d 928	69
1941	Mullins v. Thomas	150 S.W.2d 83	69
1948	Halliburton v. Texas Indemnity Insurance	213 S.W.2d 677	62

Showing the 15 most-cited of 177 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 Texas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was William M. Taylor on?: William M. Taylor was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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