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 1954 / Served to 1974

Carlisle W. Higgins

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Carlisle W. Higgins was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1954. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1889–1980
Tenure: 1954–1974 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1954	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Judicial Record

In our data, Higgins authored 664 published opinions for the court (1954–1974), plus 46 dissents and 20 concurrences. Most cited: Kessing v. National Mortgage Corporation (467 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. 184 of these were attributed to Higgins 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
1971	Kessing v. National Mortgage Corporation· Dissent†	180 S.E.2d 823	467
1965	Anderson v. LINCOLN CONSTRUCTION COMPANY	144 S.E.2d 272	240
1956	State v. Stephens	93 S.E.2d 431	220
1971	State v. Williams· Dissent†	185 S.E.2d 174	195
1969	State v. Atkinson· Concurrence†	167 S.E.2d 241	191
1973	State v. Waddell· Concurrence†	194 S.E.2d 19	142
1972	State v. Stepney· Concurrence†	185 S.E.2d 844	122
1962	Harding v. THOMAS AND HOWARD COMPANY	124 S.E.2d 109	117
1972	State Ex Rel. Utilities Commission v. General Telephone Co. of the Southeast· Concurrence†	189 S.E.2d 705	112
1972	State v. Thompson· Concurrence†	185 S.E.2d 666	112
1974	State v. Noell· Dissent†	202 S.E.2d 750	109
1974	Boyce v. McMahan	208 S.E.2d 692	97
1973	State v. Streeter· Dissent†	195 S.E.2d 502	92
1962	Sims ex rel. Sims v. Charlotte Liberty Mutual Insurance· Concurrence†	257 N.C. 32	86
1955	Hunt v. Bradshaw	88 S.E.2d 762	77

Showing the 15 most-cited of 730 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 Carlisle W. Higgins on?: Carlisle W. Higgins 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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20 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).