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 1950 / Served to 1960

Jefferson D. Johnson Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Jefferson D. Johnson Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1950. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1900–1960
Tenure: 1950–1960 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1950	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

Duke University
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Judicial Record

In our data, Johnson authored 298 published opinions for the court (1804–1958), plus 9 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Hayes v. City of Wilmington (126 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. 69 of these were attributed to Johnson 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
1956	Hayes v. City of Wilmington	91 S.E.2d 673	126
1952	Smith v. Hefner	68 S.E.2d 783	124
1951	Vail v. Vail	63 S.E.2d 202	121
1955	Pinnix v. Toomey	87 S.E.2d 893	99
1951	Vause v. Vause Farm Equipment Co.	63 S.E.2d 173	95
1955	Peek v. Wachovia Bank & Trust Company	86 S.E.2d 745	86
1954	State v. Mobley	83 S.E.2d 100	81
1953	Carolina-Virginia Coastal Highway v. Coastal Turnpike Authority	74 S.E.2d 310	74
1954	Bowen v. Darden	84 S.E.2d 289	68
1952	Greene v. Spivey	73 S.E.2d 488	65
1953	Neal v. Marrone	79 S.E.2d 239	61
1955	Badame v. Lampke	89 S.E.2d 466	59
1952	In Re Housing Authority of City of Salisbury	70 S.E.2d 500	58
1954	Jarman v. Offutt	80 S.E.2d 248	57
1955	Gaither Corporation v. Skinner	85 S.E.2d 909	56

Showing the 15 most-cited of 312 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 Jefferson D. Johnson Jr. on?: Jefferson D. Johnson Jr. 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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10 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).