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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Court of Appeals of North Carolina / Joined 1979 / Served to 1994

Hugh Albert Wells

Judge, Court of Appeals of North Carolina

Hugh Albert Wells was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1922–2000
Tenure: 1979–1994 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Court of Appeals of North Carolina	–	–

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Judicial Record

In our data, Wells authored 856 published opinions for the court (1979–1994), plus 57 dissents and 50 concurrences. Most cited: Wade v. Wade (139 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. 424 of these were attributed to Wells 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
1985	Wade v. Wade	325 S.E.2d 260	139
1992	Shear v. Stevens Building Co.	418 S.E.2d 841	103
1990	Walker v. North Carolina Department of Human Resources	397 S.E.2d 350	77
1993	Slade v. Vernon	429 S.E.2d 744	74
1981	Overstreet v. Brookland, Inc.	279 S.E.2d 1	70
1989	International Paper Co. v. Corporex Constructors, Inc.	385 S.E.2d 553	68
1989	Brown v. Burlington Industries, Inc.	378 S.E.2d 232	66
1992	Drouillard v. Keister Williams Newspaper Services, Inc.	423 S.E.2d 324	63
1985	Watts v. Cumberland County Hospital System, Inc.· Concurrence†	330 S.E.2d 242	60
1984	Heatherly v. Montgomery Components, Inc.	323 S.E.2d 29	55
1980	Equitable Leasing Corp. v. Myers	265 S.E.2d 240	53
1980	Hollar v. Montclair Furniture Co., Inc.	269 S.E.2d 667	52
1992	State v. Fleming	415 S.E.2d 782	47
1987	Zinn v. Walker	361 S.E.2d 314	46
1985	Marion v. Long	325 S.E.2d 300	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 963 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 Court of Appeals of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Hugh Albert Wells on?: Hugh Albert Wells was a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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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15 years on the Court of Appeals of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).