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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Montana Supreme Court / Joined 1977 / Served to 1985

Daniel J. Shea

Justice, Montana Supreme Court

Daniel J. Shea was a Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1906 · age 120
Tenure: 1977–1985 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Montana Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Shea authored 322 published opinions for the court (1977–1985), plus 91 dissents and 78 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Just (262 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. 287 of these were attributed to Shea 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
1979	State v. Just· Dissent†	602 P.2d 957	262
1983	Transamerica Insurance v. Royle· Concurrence†	656 P.2d 820	143
1979	State v. Coleman· Concurrence†	605 P.2d 1000	133
1980	State v. McKenzie· Dissent†	608 P.2d 428	117
1978	Brown v. North American Manufacturing Co.· Concurrence†	576 P.2d 711	95
1979	State Ex Rel. Zander v. DISTRICT COURT OF THE FOURTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT· Concurrence†	591 P.2d 656	86
1983	Klaudt v. Flink· Dissent†	658 P.2d 1065	84
1978	State v. Coleman· Dissent†	579 P.2d 732	82
1978	State v. McKenzie· Dissent†	581 P.2d 1205	79
1984	State v. Liddell· Dissent†	685 P.2d 918	75
1979	Azure Ex Rel. Marchington v. City of Billings	596 P.2d 460	74
1981	Coleman v. State· Dissent†	633 P.2d 624	67
1982	State v. Riley· Dissent†	649 P.2d 1273	66
1982	Jacques v. Montana National Guard· Dissent†	649 P.2d 1319	65
1981	Montana Automobile Ass'n v. Greely· Concurrence†	632 P.2d 300	62

Showing the 15 most-cited of 491 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 Montana Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Daniel J. Shea on?: Daniel J. Shea was a Justice of the Montana 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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8 years on the Montana Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).