How do judges of the Montana Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Montana Supreme Court / Joined 1983 / Served to 1989

Leslie C. Gulbrandson

Justice, Montana Supreme Court

Leslie C. Gulbrandson was a Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1983. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1923 · age 103
Tenure: 1983–1989 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1983	Montana Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Gulbrandson authored 333 published opinions for the court (1966–1989), plus 73 dissents and 35 concurrences. Most cited: Buckman v. Montana Deaconess Hospital (117 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. 190 of these were attributed to Gulbrandson 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
1986	Buckman v. Montana Deaconess Hospital· Dissent†	730 P.2d 380	117
1985	Nicholson v. United Pacific Insurance	710 P.2d 1342	101
1984	State v. Anderson	686 P.2d 193	95
1986	Butte Community Union v. Lewis· Concurrence†	712 P.2d 1309	91
1984	Dare v. Montana Petroleum Marketing Co.· Concurrence†	687 P.2d 1015	84
1986	State v. Geyman	729 P.2d 475	73
1984	Johnson v. Supersave Markets, Inc.· Concurrence†	686 P.2d 209	72
1983	Gates v. Life of Montana Insurance· Dissent†	668 P.2d 213	71
1983	Simmons v. State	670 P.2d 1372	66
1983	White v. State· Concurrence†	661 P.2d 1272	65
1989	First Bank (N.A.) — Billings v. Clark	771 P.2d 84	60
1985	Pfost v. State· Dissent†	713 P.2d 495	58
1986	State Ex Rel. Deere & Co. v. District Court of the Fifth Judicial District· Concurrence†	730 P.2d 396	57
1988	State v. Miller	757 P.2d 1275	54
1985	Tribby v. Northwestern Bank of Great Falls	704 P.2d 409	54

Showing the 15 most-cited of 441 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 Montana Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Leslie C. Gulbrandson on?: Leslie C. Gulbrandson was a Justice of the Montana 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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6 years on the Montana Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).