TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Nov 30, 2022

Retiring Supreme Court Justice Sharon Lee will be remembered as a bold dissenter, former Knoxville News Sentinel associate editor Georgia Vines writes in a recent column. Lee wrote so many dissenting opinions in 2017 that the Knoxville Bar Association wrote a story about it, Vines says. Some of those involved majority opinions that Lee believed provided inadequate constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, deprived parents facing termination of their rights the effective assistance of counsel, and erected barriers for inmates’ access to the courts. Vines also looks at a paper written in 2020 by a Nashville School of Law student who examined the overarching themes of Lee’s dissents. Lee, the longest-serving judge on the Tennessee Supreme Court, will retire on Aug. 31, 2023.