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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Court of Appeals of North Carolina / Joined 1977 / Served to 1979

Burlery Mitchell Jr.

Judge, Court of Appeals of North Carolina

Burlery Mitchell Jr. was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1940 · age 86
Tenure: 1977–1979 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Court of Appeals of North Carolina	–	–

Education

North Carolina State University at Raleigh

Judicial Record

In our data, Mitchell authored 109 published opinions for the court (1978–1979), plus 3 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Smith (92 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. 40 of these were attributed to Mitchell 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
1979	State v. Smith	252 S.E.2d 535	92
1979	Best v. Perry	254 S.E.2d 281	45
1978	Dockery v. Lampart Table Co.	244 S.E.2d 272	44
1978	State v. McDougald	248 S.E.2d 72	28
1978	Matthews v. North Carolina Department of Transportation	242 S.E.2d 653	27
1979	Ludwig v. Hart	252 S.E.2d 270	22
1978	State v. Mills	249 S.E.2d 446	21
1978	State v. Hunt	246 S.E.2d 159	20
1978	Chicago Title Insurance v. Holt	244 S.E.2d 177	17
1978	Combined Insurance Co. of America v. McDonald	243 S.E.2d 817	17
1978	Mazda Motors of America, Inc. v. Southwestern Motors, Inc.	243 S.E.2d 793	17
1979	Godley Const. Co., Inc. v. McDaniel	253 S.E.2d 359	16
1978	State v. Long	246 S.E.2d 846	16
1979	County of Stanislaus v. Ross	255 S.E.2d 229	15
1978	Liles v. Myers	248 S.E.2d 385	15

Showing the 15 most-cited of 114 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 Court of Appeals of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Burlery Mitchell Jr. on?: Burlery Mitchell Jr. was a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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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2 years on the Court of Appeals of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).