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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

North Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1998 / Former Justice

Carol Ronning Kapsner

Justice, North Dakota Supreme Court

Carol Ronning Kapsner was a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1998. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1947 · age 79
Tenure: 1998 · 28 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1998	North Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Saint Catharine College
University of Colorado Boulder

Judicial Record

In our data, Kapsner authored 714 published opinions for the court (1998–2017), plus 73 dissents and 60 concurrences. Most cited: Van Grinsven v. G.R.H. (91 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. 463 of these were attributed to Kapsner 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
2006	Van Grinsven v. G.R.H.· Dissent†	711 N.W.2d 587	91
2007	WFND, LLC v. Fargo Marc, LLC	2007 ND 67	85
1999	Hawkinson v. Hawkinson	1999 ND 58	77
2010	Wolt v. Wolt	2010 ND 26	76
2006	State v. Blue	2006 ND 134	70
2000	State v. Erickstad	2000 ND 202	66
1999	State v. Burr· Dissent†	598 N.W.2d 147	66
2001	Rodenburg v. Fargo-Moorhead Young Men's Christian Ass'n	2001 ND 139	62
2010	Heinle v. Heinle	2010 ND 5	61
1999	Moilan v. Moilan†	598 N.W.2d 81	59
2005	Brandt v. Somerville	2005 ND 35	57
2003	Sommers v. Sommers	2003 ND 77	54
2006	Ulsaker v. White	2006 ND 133	52
2006	State Ex Rel. Stenehjem v. FreeEats.com, Inc.	2006 ND 84	52
2008	Hitz v. Hitz	2008 ND 58	51

Showing the 15 most-cited of 848 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 North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Carol Ronning Kapsner on?: Carol Ronning Kapsner was a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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