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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Montana Supreme Court / Joined 1961 / Served to 1998

John C. Harrison

Justice, Montana Supreme Court

John C. Harrison was a Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1961. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1913–2004
Tenure: 1961–1998 · 37 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1961	Montana Supreme Court	–	–

Education

George Washington University

Judicial Record

In our data, Harrison authored 910 published opinions for the court (1978–1994), plus 76 dissents and 23 concurrences. Most cited: Transamerica Insurance v. Royle (143 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. 380 of these were attributed to Harrison 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
1983	Transamerica Insurance v. Royle	656 P.2d 820	143
1981	State v. Gopher	631 P.2d 293	143
1989	Meech v. Hillhaven West, Inc.· Dissent†	776 P.2d 488	116
1978	Brown v. North American Manufacturing Co.	576 P.2d 711	95
1978	State v. Coleman· Concurrence†	579 P.2d 732	82
1980	In Re the Marriage of Herron	608 P.2d 97	79
1991	State v. Harris· Dissent†	808 P.2d 453	71
1981	Coleman v. State	633 P.2d 624	67
1982	State v. Riley	649 P.2d 1273	66
1980	State v. Campbell	615 P.2d 190	66
1982	Jacques v. Montana National Guard· Dissent†	649 P.2d 1319	65
1981	State v. Close	623 P.2d 940	65
1979	Rumph v. Dale Edwards, Inc.	600 P.2d 163	64
1979	Fiscus v. Beartooth Electric Cooperative, Inc.	591 P.2d 196	63
1988	State v. Clark	762 P.2d 853	59

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,009 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 Montana Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was John C. Harrison on?: John C. Harrison was a Justice of the Montana 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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37 years on the Montana Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).