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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Maine Supreme Judicial Court / Joined 1997 / Active

Leigh I. Saufley

Justice, Maine Supreme Judicial Court

Leigh I. Saufley is a Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, serving since 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1954 · age 72
Tenure: Since 1997 · 28 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	Maine Supreme Judicial Court	–	–

Education

University of Maine
University of Maine

Judicial Record

In our data, Saufley authored 1,210 published opinions for the court (1998–2019), plus 8 dissents and 21 concurrences. Most cited: Curtis v. Porter (461 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. 335 of these were attributed to Saufley 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
2001	Curtis v. Porter	2001 ME 158	461
2008	Dyer v. Department of Transportation	2008 ME 106	276
2006	Saunders v. Tisher	2006 ME 94	198
2002	Johnson v. McNeil	2002 ME 99	189
2000	Rideout v. Riendeau†	2000 ME 198	170
2005	Reliance National Indemnity v. Knowles Industrial Services, Corp.	2005 ME 29	159
1999	Bryan R. v. Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, Inc.†	1999 ME 144	138
2009	Watt v. UniFirst Corp.	2009 ME 47	131
2003	Doyle v. Department of Human Services	2003 ME 61	128
2003	Parrish v. Wright	2003 ME 90	125
2004	Stanley v. Hancock County Commissioners	2004 ME 157	121
2009	Chase Home Finance LLC v. Higgins	2009 ME 136	118
2005	Inkel v. Livingston	2005 ME 42	117
2012	State v. Dolloff†	58 A.3d 1032	116
2010	Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. v. Saunders	2010 ME 79	116

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,239 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 Maine Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court is Leigh I. Saufley on?: Leigh I. Saufley is a Justice of the Maine 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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28 years on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).