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

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Colorado Supreme Court / Joined 1976 / Served to 1979

Jim R. Carrigan

Justice, Colorado Supreme Court

Jim R. Carrigan was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1976. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1929–2014
Tenure: 1976–1979 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1976	Colorado Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of North Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, Carrigan authored 162 published opinions for the court (1976–1979), plus 24 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Tenorio (565 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. 99 of these were attributed to Carrigan 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
1979	People v. Tenorio	590 P.2d 952	565
1978	Till v. People	581 P.2d 299	364
1977	People v. Gladney	570 P.2d 231	254
1979	Steinberger v. DIST. CT. IN & FOR TENTH JUD.	596 P.2d 755	252
1978	People v. McKenna	585 P.2d 275	243
1977	People v. Hines	572 P.2d 467	218
1979	People v. Ortega	597 P.2d 1034	195
1978	Radiology Professional Corp. v. Trinidad Area Health Ass'n· Dissent†	577 P.2d 748	176
1977	People v. Treat	568 P.2d 473	176
1978	In Re Marriage of Graham· Dissent†	574 P.2d 75	123
1978	People v. Sepeda· Concurrence†	581 P.2d 723	87
1977	Elizondo v. STATE, DEPT. OF REVENUE, ETC.	570 P.2d 518	75
1977	Lamm v. Barber	565 P.2d 538	73
1978	Duncan v. Schuster-Graham Homes, Inc.	578 P.2d 637	63
1978	People v. Saars	584 P.2d 622	62

Showing the 15 most-cited of 195 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 Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Jim R. Carrigan on?: Jim R. Carrigan was a Justice of the Colorado 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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3 years on the Colorado Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).