How do judges of the Supreme Court of North Carolina reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of North Carolina / Joined 2000 / Served to 2000

Franklin Freeman

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Franklin Freeman was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 2000. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1945 · age 81
Tenure: 2000–2000

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Judicial Record

In our data, Freeman authored 12 published opinions for the court (1999–2000). Most cited: Dobson v. Harris (290 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 Freeman 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
2000	Dobson v. Harris	530 S.E.2d 829	290
2000	State v. Hughes	539 S.E.2d 625	198
2000	Energy Investors Fund, L.P. v. Metric Constructors, Inc.	525 S.E.2d 441	92
2000	State v. Smith	524 S.E.2d 28	70
2000	State v. Smith	532 S.E.2d 773	67
2000	State v. Greene	528 S.E.2d 575	58
2000	Frost v. Mazda Motor of America, Inc.	540 S.E.2d 324	54
2000	State v. Grigsby	526 S.E.2d 460	40
1999	State v. Sokolowski	522 S.E.2d 65	30
2000	State v. Israel	539 S.E.2d 633	27
2000	In re Braun†	352 N.C. 327	3
2000	Bailey v. State†	351 N.C. 440	3

Showing the 12 most-cited of 12 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 Supreme Court of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Franklin Freeman on?: Franklin Freeman was a Justice of the Supreme Court 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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Joined the court in 2000. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).