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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Idaho Supreme Court / Joined 1948 / Served to 1959

James W. Porter

Justice, Idaho Supreme Court

James W. Porter was a Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1948. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1887–1959
Tenure: 1948–1959 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1948	Idaho Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Porter authored 201 published opinions for the court (1938–1959), plus 13 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Boughton v. Price (65 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. 54 of these were attributed to Porter 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
1950	Boughton v. Price	215 P.2d 286	65
1953	State v. Spencer	258 P.2d 1147	57
1950	Nelson v. Hoff	218 P.2d 345	52
1955	In Re the Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Co.· Dissent†	284 P.2d 681	40
1952	Weitzel v. Jukich· Concurrence†	251 P.2d 542	40
1952	Hogan v. Blakney	251 P.2d 209	40
1958	Shurrum v. Watts· Dissent†	324 P.2d 380	38
1955	Jensen v. Chandler	291 P.2d 1116	35
1955	State v. Mitchell	289 P.2d 315	35
1952	Neff v. Hysen	244 P.2d 146	32
1952	Boise City v. Sinsel	241 P.2d 173	31
1950	Fogelstrom v. Murphy	222 P.2d 1080	31
1957	Lewis v. Department of Law Enforcement	311 P.2d 976	30
1949	Clyde Hess Distributing Co. v. Bonneville County	210 P.2d 798	30
1949	Gardner v. Hobbs	206 P.2d 539	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 217 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 Idaho Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was James W. Porter on?: James W. Porter was a Justice of the Idaho 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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11 years on the Idaho Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).