How do judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court / Joined 1944 / Served to 1971

John Spalding

Justice, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

John Spalding was a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, who joined the court in 1944. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1897–1979
Tenure: 1944–1971 · 27 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1944	Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court	–	–

Education

Harvard University
Harvard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Spalding authored 933 published opinions for the court (1944–1971), plus 3 dissents. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Domanski (320 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. 322 of these were attributed to Spalding 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
1954	Commonwealth v. Domanski	123 N.E.2d 368	320
1965	Commonwealth v. Fancy	207 N.E.2d 276	202
1963	Barrett Associates, Inc. v. Aronson	190 N.E.2d 867	161
1958	Lolos v. Berlin	153 N.E.2d 636	148
1968	Brune v. Belinkoff	235 N.E.2d 793	127
1965	Commonwealth v. Balliro	209 N.E.2d 308	117
1967	Alegata v. Commonwealth	231 N.E.2d 201	116
1963	Commonwealth v. Lewis	191 N.E.2d 753	115
1955	Yorke v. Taylor	124 N.E.2d 912	105
1967	Commonwealth v. White	232 N.E.2d 335	104
1952	Cardullo v. Landau	105 N.E.2d 843	104
1970	Commonwealth v. Connolly	255 N.E.2d 191	99
1969	Commonwealth v. Harvard	253 N.E.2d 346	98
1966	Cohen v. Board of Registration in Pharmacy	214 N.E.2d 63	98
1956	Kagan v. Levenson	134 N.E.2d 415	93

Showing the 15 most-cited of 936 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 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was John Spalding on?: John Spalding was a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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27 years on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).