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 2001 / Served to 2002

George Kenneth Butterfield Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 2001. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1947 · age 79
Tenure: 2001–2002 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2001	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Butterfield authored 21 published opinions for the court (2001–2002), plus 3 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Scott (180 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. 16 of these were attributed to Butterfield 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
2002	State v. Scott	573 S.E.2d 866	180
2002	Liberty Mutual Insurance v. Pennington	573 S.E.2d 118	165
2002	Mann Media, Inc. v. Randolph County Planning Board· Dissent†	565 S.E.2d 9	160
2002	State v. Mann	560 S.E.2d 776	133
2002	Stephenson v. Bartlett· Dissent†	562 S.E.2d 377	120
2002	State v. Robinson	561 S.E.2d 245	106
2001	State v. Matias· Dissent†	556 S.E.2d 269	90
2002	State v. Butler	567 S.E.2d 137	85
2001	State v. Ward	555 S.E.2d 251	65
2001	State v. Taylor	550 S.E.2d 141	36
2002	State v. Anderson	558 S.E.2d 87	35
2001	In Re Byrd· Concurrence†	552 S.E.2d 142	28
2001	Piedmont Triad Airport Authority v. Urbine	554 S.E.2d 331	27
2001	State v. Wilson· Concurrence†	556 S.E.2d 272	21
2002	State v. Leeper	565 S.E.2d 1	8

Showing the 15 most-cited of 26 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 George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. on?: George Kenneth Butterfield Jr. 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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1 year on the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).