How do judges of the New Mexico Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

New Mexico Supreme Court / Joined 1947 / Served to 1960

James Bliss McGhee

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

James Bliss McGhee was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1947. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1888–1970
Tenure: 1947–1960 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1947	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McGhee authored 311 published opinions for the court (1941–1960), plus 33 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Thompson v. Anderman (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. 93 of these were attributed to McGhee 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
1955	Thompson v. Anderman· Dissent†	285 P.2d 507	83
1953	State v. Compton· Dissent†	257 P.2d 915	76
1949	State v. McKinley· Dissent	202 P.2d 964	62
1956	Village of Deming v. Hosdreg Company· Dissent†	303 P.2d 920	61
1957	Campbell v. Campbell	310 P.2d 266	54
1951	Ortega v. Koury· Dissent†	227 P.2d 941	53
1960	State v. Turnbow	354 P.2d 533	52
1950	Wilson v. Rowan Drilling Co.· Dissent†	227 P.2d 365	50
1960	State v. Romero	352 P.2d 781	46
1958	Totah Drilling Company v. Abraham	328 P.2d 1083	46
1950	Griego v. Conwell	222 P.2d 606	46
1959	Hartford Fire Insurance Company v. Horne	338 P.2d 1067	43
1958	Chavez v. Village of Cimarron	333 P.2d 882	41
1953	Hollingsworth v. Hicks· Concurrence†	57 N.M. 336	40
1950	State v. Goodson	217 P.2d 262	40

Showing the 15 most-cited of 356 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 New Mexico Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was James Bliss McGhee on?: James Bliss McGhee was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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