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 1979 / Served to 1980

Edwin L. Felter

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Edwin L. Felter was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1917–2004
Tenure: 1979–1980 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Education

American University

Judicial Record

In our data, Felter authored 28 published opinions for the court (1972–1980). Most cited: State v. Martinez (53 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. 2 of these were attributed to Felter 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
1980	State v. Martinez	612 P.2d 228	53
1980	State v. Robinson	616 P.2d 406	46
1979	State v. Stephens	601 P.2d 428	44
1980	New Mexico Human Services Department v. Garcia	608 P.2d 151	37
1980	State v. Day	617 P.2d 142	31
1980	Poore v. State	608 P.2d 148	30
1980	City of Albuquerque v. Redding	605 P.2d 1156	27
1980	Delph v. Potomac Insurance	620 P.2d 1282	24
1979	State v. Rogers	602 P.2d 616	21
1980	State v. Garcia	620 P.2d 1285	18
1980	Holiday Management Co. v. City of Santa Fe	610 P.2d 1197	17
1980	New Mexico Livestock Board v. Dose	607 P.2d 606	16
1980	Barker v. Barker	608 P.2d 138	16
1979	City of Albuquerque v. New Mexico State Corp. Commission	605 P.2d 227	16
1980	O'KELLY v. State	607 P.2d 612	15

Showing the 15 most-cited of 28 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 Edwin L. Felter on?: Edwin L. Felter 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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1 year 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).