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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of North Carolina / Joined 1974 / Served to 1995

James G. Exum

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

James G. Exum was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1935 · age 91
Tenure: 1974–1995 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1974	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Polytechnic Institute of New York University

Judicial Record

In our data, Exum authored 410 published opinions for the court (1975–1994), plus 105 dissents and 40 concurrences. Most cited: Hilliard v. Apex Cabinet Co. (661 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. 174 of these were attributed to Exum 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
1982	Hilliard v. Apex Cabinet Co.· Concurrence†	290 S.E.2d 682	661
1991	Koufman v. Koufman	408 S.E.2d 729	556
1980	Click v. Pilot Freight Carriers, Inc.	265 S.E.2d 389	530
1981	Dickens v. Puryear	276 S.E.2d 325	429
1983	Rutledge v. Tultex Corp./Kings Yarn	301 S.E.2d 359	428
1979	State v. Johnson· Dissent†	259 S.E.2d 752	310
1984	State v. Brown· Dissent†	313 S.E.2d 585	307
1987	State v. Stokes	352 S.E.2d 653	297
1980	Coble v. Coble	268 S.E.2d 185	297
1983	State v. Williams· Dissent†	301 S.E.2d 335	283
1984	State v. Hill· Dissent†	319 S.E.2d 163	282
1986	Peoples v. Cone Mills Corp.	342 S.E.2d 798	275
1993	State v. McCollum· Concurrence†	433 S.E.2d 144	269
1978	State v. Wilkerson	247 S.E.2d 905	266
1991	Woodson v. Rowland	407 S.E.2d 222	256

Showing the 15 most-cited of 555 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 North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was James G. Exum on?: James G. Exum was a Justice of the Supreme Court 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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21 years on the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).