How do judges of the Supreme Court of North Carolina reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of North Carolina / Joined 1938 / Served to 1950

Aaron A. F. Seawell

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Aaron A. F. Seawell was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1938. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1864–1950
Tenure: 1938–1950 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1938	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Judicial Record

In our data, Seawell authored 619 published opinions for the court (1813–1950), plus 28 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: State v. . Harris (126 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. 115 of these were attributed to Seawell 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
1940	State v. . Harris	6 S.E.2d 854	126
1944	Kadis v. . Britt	29 S.E.2d 543	115
1942	Haynes v. . Feldspar Producing Co.	22 S.E.2d 275	111
1942	Wall v. . Bain	23 S.E.2d 330	83
1938	Wells v. Housing Authority of the City of Wilmington	197 S.E. 693	79
1942	Town of Tryon v. Duke Power Co.	22 S.E.2d 450	76
1942	Williams v. . Williams	18 S.E.2d 364	74
1943	State v. . Gregory	27 S.E.2d 140	72
1944	State v. Emery· Dissent†	224 N.C. 581	71
1949	Bye v. Interstate Granite Co.	53 S.E.2d 274	67
1939	Lilly Co. v. . Saunders	4 S.E.2d 528	65
1938	Cole v. Koonce†	214 N.C. 188	65
1943	Charnock v. . Taylor	26 S.E.2d 911	58
1943	State v. Gregory†	223 N.C. 415	56
1938	Cole v. . Koonce	198 S.E. 637	56

Showing the 15 most-cited of 663 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 North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Aaron A. F. Seawell on?: Aaron A. F. Seawell was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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