How do judges of the Rhode Island Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Rhode Island Supreme Court / Joined 1973 / Served to 1981

John F. Doris

Justice, Rhode Island Supreme Court

John F. Doris was a Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1973. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1973–1981 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1973	Rhode Island Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Providence College
Boston University

Judicial Record

In our data, Doris authored 255 published opinions for the court (1973–1980), plus 6 dissents. Most cited: D'Ambra v. United States (84 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. 42 of these were attributed to Doris 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
1975	D'Ambra v. United States	338 A.2d 524	84
1978	Rozes v. Smith	388 A.2d 816	81
1979	Berthiaume v. SCHOOL COM. OF CITY OF WOONSOCKET	397 A.2d 889	79
1976	Ardente v. Horan	366 A.2d 162	61
1976	Raheb v. Lemenski	350 A.2d 397	60
1978	State v. Innis	391 A.2d 1158	55
1980	State v. McGranahan	415 A.2d 1298	53
1974	Sherman v. McDermott	329 A.2d 195	53
1980	State v. Halstead	414 A.2d 1138	52
1980	State v. Santos	413 A.2d 58	49
1976	Providence Journal Company v. Mason	359 A.2d 682	48
1979	State v. Porraro	404 A.2d 465	47
1977	Mello v. Superior Court· Dissent†	370 A.2d 1262	44
1975	Romano v. Westinghouse Electric Co.	336 A.2d 555	44
1974	State v. Murphy· Dissent†	323 A.2d 561	41

Showing the 15 most-cited of 261 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 Rhode Island Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was John F. Doris on?: John F. Doris was a Justice of the Rhode Island 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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8 years on the Rhode Island Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).