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 1975 / Served to 1991

Dan Sosa Jr.

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Dan Sosa Jr. was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1975. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1923 · age 103
Tenure: 1975–1991 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1975	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Education

New Mexico State University-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Sosa authored 321 published opinions for the court (1975–1991), plus 49 dissents and 17 concurrences. Most cited: Hicks v. State (165 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. 129 of these were attributed to Sosa 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
1976	Hicks v. State· Dissent†	544 P.2d 1153	165
1989	State v. Clark· Concurrence†	772 P.2d 322	106
1984	Duke City Lumber Co. v. New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board· Dissent†	681 P.2d 717	103
1981	Buzbee v. Donnelly· Dissent†	634 P.2d 1244	99
1985	Schmick v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance	704 P.2d 1092	86
1990	State v. Henderson	789 P.2d 603	80
1984	Vigil v. Arzola	687 P.2d 1038	76
1977	State v. Harrison	564 P.2d 1321	76
1975	State v. Tanton· Concurrence†	540 P.2d 813	74
1983	State v. Garcia· Concurrence†	664 P.2d 969	73
1977	State Ex Rel. Bird v. Apodaca· Dissent†	573 P.2d 213	71
1977	State v. Noble· Dissent†	563 P.2d 1153	69
1975	Archibeque v. Homrich	543 P.2d 820	67
1984	State v. McCrary· Dissent†	675 P.2d 120	66
1985	Hood v. Fulkerson	699 P.2d 608	59

Showing the 15 most-cited of 387 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 was Dan Sosa Jr. on?: Dan Sosa Jr. was 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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16 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).