How do judges of the New Hampshire Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

New Hampshire Supreme Court / Joined 1946 / Served to 1976

Laurence Ilsley Duncan

Justice, New Hampshire Supreme Court

Laurence Ilsley Duncan was a Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1946. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1906 · age 120
Tenure: 1946–1976 · 30 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1946	New Hampshire Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Duncan authored 537 published opinions for the court (1947–1976), plus 42 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: Clark v. Clark (164 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. 177 of these were attributed to Duncan 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
1966	Clark v. Clark· Dissent†	107 N.H. 351	164
1976	Ouellette v. Blanchard· Concurrence†	116 N.H. 552	99
1974	Merrill v. City of Manchester· Concurrence†	114 N.H. 722	93
1973	Stone v. Shea	113 N.H. 174	48
1954	Desrochers v. New York Casualty Co.	99 N.H. 129	43
1949	New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. State	64 A.2d 9	41
1976	Cornwell v. Cornwell	116 N.H. 205	38
1974	Morrissette v. Sears, Roebuck & Co.	114 N.H. 384	37
1947	Newell v. Moreau· Concurrence	55 A.2d 476	37
1968	In Re Unification of the New Hampshire Bar· Dissent†	109 N.H. 260	34
1962	Bolduc v. Crain	104 N.H. 163	34
1971	Raitt v. National Grange Mutual Insurance	111 N.H. 397	32
1951	Farm Bureau Automobile Insurance v. Martin· Dissent†	97 N.H. 196	32
1969	State v. Coolidge	109 N.H. 403	30
1960	Carter v. Bergeron	102 N.H. 464	29

Showing the 15 most-cited of 587 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 New Hampshire Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Laurence Ilsley Duncan on?: Laurence Ilsley Duncan was a Justice of the New Hampshire 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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30 years on the New Hampshire Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).