How do judges of the New Mexico Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

New Mexico Supreme Court / Joined 2007 / Active

Charles W. Daniels

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Charles W. Daniels is a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, serving since 2007. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2007 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2007	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Arizona
University of New Mexico-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Daniels authored 61 published opinions for the court (2008–2018), plus 3 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Montoya (187 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. 42 of these were attributed to Daniels 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
2013	State v. Montoya†	4 N.M. 196	187
2010	State v. Flores	226 P.3d 641	185
2009	Cordova v. World Finance Corp. of NM	208 P.3d 901	153
2011	Rivera v. American General Financial Services, Inc.	259 P.3d 803	144
2010	Quynh Truong v. Allstate Insurance	227 P.3d 73	143
2009	Dewitt v. Rent-A-Center, Inc.	212 P.3d 341	139
2012	State v. Spearman· Concurrence†	2012 NMSC 23	133
2012	State v. Guerra†	2012 NMSC 27	119
2009	State v. NICK R.	218 P.3d 868	119
2008	State v. Rowell	188 P.3d 95	114
2008	State v. Rudolfo	187 P.3d 170	114
2010	State v. Riley· Concurrence†	226 P.3d 656	103
2014	State v. Crocco†	6 N.M. 174	96
2008	State v. Saiz	191 P.3d 521	90
2013	State v. Samora†	4 N.M. 565	84

Showing the 15 most-cited of 64 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 New Mexico Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court is Charles W. Daniels on?: Charles W. Daniels is a Justice of the New Mexico 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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19 years on the New Mexico Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).