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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Nevada / Joined 1961 / Served to 1980

Gordon Rufus Thompson

Justice, Supreme Court of Nevada

Gordon Rufus Thompson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Nevada, who joined the court in 1961. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1918–1995
Tenure: 1961–1980 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1961	Supreme Court of Nevada	–	–

Education

Stanford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Thompson authored 519 published opinions for the court (1961–1980), plus 44 dissents and 27 concurrences. Most cited: Hamm v. Carson City Nugget, Inc. (104 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. 191 of these were attributed to Thompson 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
1969	Hamm v. Carson City Nugget, Inc.	450 P.2d 358	104
1969	Waugh v. Casazza	458 P.2d 359	80
1965	Bean v. State	398 P.2d 251	80
1962	Garner v. State	374 P.2d 525	74
1966	Shoshone Coca-Cola Bottling Company v. Dolinski	420 P.2d 855	70
1980	Gary v. Sheriff†	96 Nev. 78	69
1970	State v. Silva	478 P.2d 591	68
1963	Hotel Last Frontier Corp. v. Frontier Properties, Inc.	380 P.2d 293	63
1980	Bull v. McCuskey	615 P.2d 957	56
1978	Wright v. State	581 P.2d 442	55
1964	Kuk v. State	392 P.2d 630	55
1962	Miller v. Schnitzer	371 P.2d 824	55
1974	State Ex Rel. List v. County of Douglas	524 P.2d 1271	54
1974	Warden, Nevada State Prison v. Lischko	523 P.2d 6	51
1976	Bails v. State	545 P.2d 1155	50

Showing the 15 most-cited of 590 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 Nevada reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Gordon Rufus Thompson on?: Gordon Rufus Thompson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Nevada.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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19 years on the Supreme Court of Nevada. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).