How do judges of the Michigan Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Michigan Supreme Court / Joined 1952 / Served to 1953

Clark J. Adams

Justice, Michigan Supreme Court

Clark J. Adams was a Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1952. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1904 · age 122
Tenure: 1952–1953 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1952	Michigan Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Adams authored 43 published opinions for the court (1953), plus 3 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Hayes v. Coleman (46 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. 7 of these were attributed to Adams 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
1953	Hayes v. Coleman	61 N.W.2d 634	46
1953	Sebewaing Industries, Inc. v. Village of Sebewaing	60 N.W.2d 444	43
1953	Simonelli v. Cassidy	59 N.W.2d 28	41
1953	International Union United Automobile Workers v. Wood· Dissent†	59 N.W.2d 60	41
1953	Janesick v. City of Detroit	60 N.W.2d 452	36
1953	Great Lakes Realty Corp. v. Peters	57 N.W.2d 901	33
1953	Napuche v. Liquor Control Commission	58 N.W.2d 118	32
1953	In Re Sprenger's Estate	60 N.W.2d 436	30
1953	Erlandson v. Genesee County Employees' Retirement Commission	59 N.W.2d 389	28
1953	In Re Scheyer's Estate	59 N.W.2d 33	27
1953	Holt v. Stofflet	61 N.W.2d 28	23
1953	Scott v. Alsar Company· Dissent†	58 N.W.2d 910	21
1953	People v. Johns	59 N.W.2d 20	20
1953	Tel-Craft Civic Ass'n v. City of Detroit	60 N.W.2d 294	18
1953	Alexander v. Covel Manufacturing Co.	57 N.W.2d 324	18

Showing the 15 most-cited of 47 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 Michigan Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Clark J. Adams on?: Clark J. Adams was a Justice of the Michigan 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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1 year on the Michigan Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).