[1] Most of the judges during the 18th century were laymen, merchants or farmers and did not possess formal legal training, and therefore the court did not explicitly follow English common law.

[2] In 1747 the General Assembly appointed the first Chief Justice, Gideon Cornell, who was a judge, farmer, and merchant, and the second, Joshua Babcock, a Yale-educated physician.

Since 1930, the Court has been located within the Licht Judicial Complex at the base of College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island.

Until 1994, the General Assembly sitting with both houses in "Grand Committee" chose the Supreme Court justices without the governor's consent.

In 1994, after a wave of corruption scandals, citizens amended the Rhode Island Constitution to allow the governor to choose Supreme Court nominees from a list of candidates approved by a non-partisan nominating committee.