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 1971 / Served to 1977

Donnan Stephenson

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Donnan Stephenson was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1971. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1919–2000
Tenure: 1971–1977 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1971	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Stephenson authored 109 published opinions for the court (1971–1976), plus 4 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Alexander v. Delgado Ex Rel. Delgado (314 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. 15 of these were attributed to Stephenson 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
1973	Alexander v. Delgado Ex Rel. Delgado	507 P.2d 778	314
1975	Chavez v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance	533 P.2d 100	111
1971	Williamson v. Smith	491 P.2d 1147	89
1975	State v. Tanton	540 P.2d 813	74
1973	Huey v. Lente	514 P.2d 1093	66
1972	State Ex Rel. Delgado v. Stanley	495 P.2d 1073	65
1971	Bettini v. City of Las Cruces	485 P.2d 967	63
1976	New Mexico Electric Service Co. v. Montanez	551 P.2d 634	56
1975	State Ex Rel. Anaya v. McBride	539 P.2d 1006	56
1975	Maestas v. Overton	531 P.2d 947	55
1971	City of Albuquerque v. Ackerman	482 P.2d 63	55
1973	State Ex Rel. Norvell v. Credit Bureau of Albuquerque, Inc.	514 P.2d 40	53
1975	Clark Leasing Corp. v. White Sands Forest Products, Inc.	535 P.2d 1077	52
1975	Jim v. CIT Financial Services Corporation	533 P.2d 751	50
1975	American Bank of Commerce v. Covolo	540 P.2d 1294	49

Showing the 15 most-cited of 115 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 Donnan Stephenson on?: Donnan Stephenson 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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6 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).