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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Court of Appeals of North Carolina / Joined 2006 / Active

Linda Stephens

Judge, Court of Appeals of North Carolina

Linda Stephens is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of North Carolina, serving since 2006. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1950 · age 76
Tenure: Since 2006 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2006	Court of Appeals of North Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Stephens authored 374 published opinions for the court (2006–2016), plus 9 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Kaplan v. O.K. Technologies, L.L.C. (103 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. 156 of these were attributed to Stephens 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
2009	Kaplan v. O.K. Technologies, L.L.C.†	196 N.C. App. 469	103
2008	Washburn v. Yadkin Valley Bank & Trust Co.	660 S.E.2d 577	83
2012	Wilcox v. City of Asheville†	222 N.C. App. 285	71
2011	Piraino Bros. v. Atlantic Financial Group, Inc.	712 S.E.2d 328	69
2009	State v. Jackson	681 S.E.2d 492	51
2010	In re P.O.†	207 N.C. App. 35	50
2009	Hoke County Board of Education v. State· Concurrence†	679 S.E.2d 512	46
2010	In re Y.Y.E.T.†	205 N.C. App. 120	36
2008	In re J.A.P.†	659 S.E.2d 14	34
2013	State v. Gardner†	225 N.C. App. 161	33
2009	Barringer v. FORSYTH COUNTY WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY BAPTIST MEDICAL CTR	677 S.E.2d 465	33
2011	Walker v. TOWN OF STONEVILLE	712 S.E.2d 239	32
2007	State v. Shelly	638 S.E.2d 516	32
2008	In Re I.T.P-L.	670 S.E.2d 282	31
2008	Carl v. State	665 S.E.2d 787	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 393 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 Court of Appeals of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court is Linda Stephens on?: Linda Stephens is a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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 Court of Appeals of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).