How do judges of the Court of Appeals of North Carolina reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Court of Appeals of North Carolina / Joined 2011 / Active

John Douglas McCullough

Judge, Court of Appeals of North Carolina

John Douglas McCullough is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of North Carolina, serving since 2011. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2011 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2011	Court of Appeals of North Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McCullough authored 470 published opinions for the court (2001–2017), plus 3 concurrences. Most cited: In Re Shepard (118 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. 161 of these were attributed to McCullough 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
2004	In Re Shepard	591 S.E.2d 1	118
2005	Toomer v. Branch Banking and Trust Co.	614 S.E.2d 328	90
2009	Medical Staffing Network, Inc. v. Ridgway	670 S.E.2d 321	85
2005	McLamb v. T.P., Inc.	619 S.E.2d 577	77
2003	Compton v. Kirby	577 S.E.2d 905	69
2003	Kaleel Builders, Inc. v. Ashby	587 S.E.2d 470	53
2008	Hensley v. National Freight Transportation, Inc.	668 S.E.2d 349	50
2003	Draughon v. Harnett County Board of Education	582 S.E.2d 343	48
2004	State v. Bush	595 S.E.2d 715	47
2005	Johnson v. Colonial Life & Accident Insurance	618 S.E.2d 867	43
2008	State v. Garris	663 S.E.2d 340	39
2012	State v. Corkum†	224 N.C. App. 129	38
2001	Archer v. Rockingham County	548 S.E.2d 788	37
2001	Dockery v. Quality Plastic Custom Molding, Inc.	547 S.E.2d 850	37
2005	In Re Pedestrian Walkway Failure	618 S.E.2d 819	35

Showing the 15 most-cited of 473 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 Court of Appeals of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court is John Douglas McCullough on?: John Douglas McCullough is a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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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15 years on the Court of Appeals of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).