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 1982 / Served to 1996

Clifton E. Johnson

Judge, Court of Appeals of North Carolina

Clifton E. Johnson was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1982. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1941–2009
Tenure: 1982–1996 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Court of Appeals of North Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Johnson authored 746 published opinions for the court (1982–2009), plus 32 dissents and 19 concurrences. Most cited: Spartan Leasing Inc. v. Pollard (151 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. 316 of these were attributed to Johnson 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
1991	Spartan Leasing Inc. v. Pollard	400 S.E.2d 476	151
1991	Barber v. Babcock & Wilcox Construction Co.	400 S.E.2d 735	142
1983	Blackwelder v. State Department of Human Resources	299 S.E.2d 777	94
1996	Starco, Inc. v. AMG Bonding & Insurance Services, Inc.	477 S.E.2d 211	83
1983	Hutchens v. Hankins	303 S.E.2d 584	65
1996	Moore v. Evans	476 S.E.2d 415	60
1984	Matter of Green	313 S.E.2d 193	60
1984	State v. Rozier	316 S.E.2d 893	59
1988	Myrick v. Cooley· Concurrence†	371 S.E.2d 492	58
1996	State v. Carr	470 S.E.2d 70	50
1988	Blow v. Shaughnessy	364 S.E.2d 444	50
1992	Hoots v. Pryor	417 S.E.2d 269	49
1991	Prime South Homes, Inc. v. Byrd	401 S.E.2d 822	49
1990	Parker v. Thompson-Arthur Paving Co.	396 S.E.2d 626	47
1988	Beightol v. Beightol	367 S.E.2d 347	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 797 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 Clifton E. Johnson on?: Clifton E. Johnson 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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14 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).