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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Connecticut Supreme Court / Joined 1961 / Served to 1971

Howard Wells Alcorn

Justice, Connecticut Supreme Court

Howard Wells Alcorn was a Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1961. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1901–1992
Tenure: 1961–1971 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1961	Connecticut Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Dartmouth College

Judicial Record

In our data, Alcorn authored 136 published opinions for the court (1948–1971), plus 5 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: DeMaria v. Enfield Planning & Zoning Commission (169 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. 37 of these were attributed to Alcorn 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
1970	DeMaria v. Enfield Planning & Zoning Commission	159 Conn. 534	169
1971	Plouffe v. New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad	160 Conn. 482	165
1971	Boucher Agency, Inc. v. Zimmer	160 Conn. 404	154
1970	Thomas v. Thomas	159 Conn. 477	144
1967	Zaist v. Olson†	154 Conn. 563	134
1967	Missionaries of the Co. of Mary, Inc. v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co.†	155 Conn. 104	132
1966	Triangle Sheet Metal Works, Inc. v. Silver†	154 Conn. 116	120
1970	Paiva v. Vanech Heights Construction Co.	159 Conn. 512	117
1970	Dowling v. Kielak	160 Conn. 14	99
1970	Bridgeport Pipe Engineering Co. v. DeMatteo Construction Co.	159 Conn. 242	97
1961	Rathkopf v. Pearson	148 Conn. 260	91
1966	State v. Tomanelli†	153 Conn. 365	82
1967	Reed v. Reincke	155 Conn. 591	79
1971	Ducharme v. City of Putnam	161 Conn. 135	78
1948	Low v. Town of Madison	60 A.2d 774	76

Showing the 15 most-cited of 144 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 Connecticut Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Howard Wells Alcorn on?: Howard Wells Alcorn was a Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court.

Sources

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

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