How do judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court / Joined 1932 / Served to 1955

Henry Lummus

Justice, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Henry Lummus was a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, who joined the court in 1932. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1876–1960
Tenure: 1932–1955 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1932	Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court	–	–

Education

Boston University
Boston University

Judicial Record

In our data, Lummus authored 1,061 published opinions for the court (1932–1955), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Welansky (283 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. 920 of these were attributed to Lummus 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
1944	Commonwealth v. Welansky†	316 Mass. 383	283
1944	Bartley v. Phillips†	317 Mass. 35	251
1940	Peterson v. Hopson†	306 Mass. 597	242
1944	Liberatore v. Town of Framingham†	315 Mass. 538	197
1946	Carter v. Yardley & Co.†	319 Mass. 92	190
1943	Lowell Bar Ass'n v. Loeb†	315 Mass. 176	189
1938	Cook v. Farm Service Stores, Inc.†	301 Mass. 564	139
1937	Long v. George†	296 Mass. 574	121
1938	Strong v. Haverhill Electric Co.†	299 Mass. 455	119
1946	Bowe v. Secretary of Commonwealth†	320 Mass. 230	105
1932	Barnes v. Berkshire Street Railway Co.†	281 Mass. 47	105
1940	Caswell's Case†	305 Mass. 500	103
1934	Commonwealth v. Polian†	288 Mass. 494	98
1944	National Shawmut Bank v. Joy†	315 Mass. 457	97
1940	Sargent v. Massachusetts Accident Co.†	307 Mass. 246	94

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,062 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 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Henry Lummus on?: Henry Lummus was a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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