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 1966 / Served to 1986

Joseph Branch

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Joseph Branch was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1966. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1915–1991
Tenure: 1966–1986 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1966	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

Wake Forest University

Judicial Record

In our data, Branch authored 486 published opinions for the court (1966–1986), plus 4 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Hilliard v. Apex Cabinet Co. (661 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. 31 of these were attributed to Branch 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
1982	Hilliard v. Apex Cabinet Co.	290 S.E.2d 682	661
1985	State v. Young	325 S.E.2d 181	337
1983	State v. Bondurant	309 S.E.2d 170	313
1979	State v. Johnson	259 S.E.2d 752	310
1984	State v. Brown	313 S.E.2d 585	307
1972	State v. Harvey	187 S.E.2d 706	307
1986	State v. Rogers	341 S.E.2d 713	301
1984	State v. Hill	319 S.E.2d 163	282
1981	Terry v. Terry	273 S.E.2d 674	250
1972	Koontz v. City of Winston-Salem	186 S.E.2d 897	235
1979	State v. Cherry	257 S.E.2d 551	233
1976	State v. Covington	226 S.E.2d 629	227
1974	Dickinson v. Pake· Dissent†	201 S.E.2d 897	178
1986	State v. Mason	340 S.E.2d 430	174
1974	Zimmerman v. Hogg & Allen, Professional Ass'n	209 S.E.2d 795	173

Showing the 15 most-cited of 493 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 Joseph Branch on?: Joseph Branch 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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20 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).