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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Maine Supreme Judicial Court / Joined 1971 / Served to 1980

James P. Archibald

Justice, Maine Supreme Judicial Court

James P. Archibald was a Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, who joined the court in 1971. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1912–2006
Tenure: 1971–1980 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1971	Maine Supreme Judicial Court	–	–

Education

Bowdoin College
Boston University

Judicial Record

In our data, Archibald authored 255 published opinions for the court (1971–1979), plus 4 concurrences. Most cited: In Re Maine Clean Fuels, Inc. (83 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. 258 of these were attributed to Archibald 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
1973	In Re Maine Clean Fuels, Inc.†	310 A.2d 736	83
1977	Nelson v. Times†	373 A.2d 1221	66
1979	State v. Fredette†	411 A.2d 65	64
1973	State v. Lafferty†	309 A.2d 647	62
1977	State v. Tardiff†	374 A.2d 598	57
1976	Davies v. City of Bath†	364 A.2d 1269	57
1979	Paradis v. Webber Hospital†	409 A.2d 672	42
1978	State v. Heald†	393 A.2d 537	40
1978	Hildebrand v. Holyoke Mutual Fire Insurance†	386 A.2d 329	40
1977	Fournier v. Fournier†	376 A.2d 100	39
1977	National Hearing Aid Centers, Inc. v. Smith†	376 A.2d 456	35
1974	State v. Buzynski†	330 A.2d 422	35
1979	LeMay v. Anderson†	397 A.2d 984	34
1979	Banville v. Huckins†	407 A.2d 294	32
1975	State v. Wallace†	333 A.2d 72	32

Showing the 15 most-cited of 259 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 Maine Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was James P. Archibald on?: James P. Archibald was a Justice of the Maine 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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8 years on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).