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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of North Carolina / Joined 1937 / Served to 1962

John Wallace Winborne

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

John Wallace Winborne was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1937. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1884–1967
Tenure: 1937–1962 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1937	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Judicial Record

In our data, Winborne authored 1,026 published opinions for the court (1937–1962), plus 4 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: McGill v. Town of Lumberton (91 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. 163 of these were attributed to Winborne 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
1939	McGill v. Town of Lumberton	3 S.E.2d 324	91
1940	Murray v. . R. R.	11 S.E.2d 326	75
1944	State v. . Sawyer	29 S.E.2d 34	71
1951	In Re Blalock	64 S.E.2d 848	67
1948	State v. . Gardner	46 S.E.2d 824	62
1945	Tysinger v. Coble Dairy Products	36 S.E.2d 246	62
1942	Reeves v. . Staley	18 S.E.2d 239	62
1942	Reeves v. Staley†	220 N.C. 573	62
1941	Mills v. Moore†	219 N.C. 25	62
1941	Mills v. . Moore	12 S.E.2d 661	59
1938	State v. . Payne	197 S.E. 573	59
1961	State v. Carter	119 S.E.2d 461	58
1942	Mitchell v. . Melts	18 S.E.2d 406	58
1950	Town of Burnsville v. Boone	58 S.E.2d 351	57
1942	Gilmore v. . Board of Education	23 S.E.2d 292	57

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,035 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 Supreme Court of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was John Wallace Winborne on?: John Wallace Winborne was a Justice of the Supreme Court 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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25 years on the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).