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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Vermont Supreme Court / Joined 1988 / Served to 2003

James L. Morse

Justice, Vermont Supreme Court

James L. Morse was a Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1988. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1939 · age 87
Tenure: 1988–2003 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1988	Vermont Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Dartmouth College
Boston University

Judicial Record

In our data, Morse authored 246 published opinions for the court (1988–2003), plus 63 dissents and 43 concurrences. Most cited: Cabot v. Cabot (125 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. 304 of these were attributed to Morse 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
1997	Cabot v. Cabot· Concurrence†	697 A.2d 644	125
1994	Mullin v. Phelps· Concurrence†	647 A.2d 714	118
1994	Gallipo v. City of Rutland· Concurrence†	656 A.2d 635	107
1994	State v. Delisle†	648 A.2d 632	102
1993	Carmichael v. Adirondack Bottled Gas Corp.†	635 A.2d 1211	99
2000	Hoover (Letourneau) v. Hoover	764 A.2d 1192	94
1989	Levy v. Town of St. Albans Zoning Board of Adjustment†	152 Vt. 139	94
1991	State v. Kirchoff†	587 A.2d 988	93
1996	State v. Austin· Concurrence†	685 A.2d 1076	85
1991	Lillicrap v. Martin· Concurrence†	591 A.2d 41	84
2002	In Re Appeals of Garen	807 A.2d 448	76
1997	Jordan v. State· Dissent†	166 Vt. 509	75
1993	State v. Pelican· Concurrence†	632 A.2d 24	75
1997	Amiot v. Ames· Concurrence†	693 A.2d 675	74
1995	State v. Bacon†	658 A.2d 54	74

Showing the 15 most-cited of 352 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 Vermont Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was James L. Morse on?: James L. Morse was a Justice of the Vermont 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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15 years on the Vermont Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).