How do judges of the North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

North Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 2014 / Active

Lisa K. Fair McEvers

Chief Justice, North Dakota Supreme Court

Lisa K. Fair McEvers is a Chief Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court (5 judges, selected by nonpartisan election), serving since 2014. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2014 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2014	North Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McEvers authored 220 published opinions for the court (2014–2026), plus 7 dissents and 19 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Birchfield (49 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. 246 of these were attributed to McEvers 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
2015	State v. Birchfield†	2015 ND 6	49
2014	State v. Smith†	2014 ND 152	46
2014	Datz v. Dosch†	2014 ND 102	43
2016	State v. Ballard· Concurrence†	2016 ND 8	39
2015	Beylund v. Levi†	2015 ND 18	33
2015	State v. Rufus†	2015 ND 212	31
2017	State v. Gray†	2017 ND 108	28
2016	Zajac v. Traill County Water Resource District†	2016 ND 134	28
2014	Lindsey v. State†	2014 ND 174	28
2019	State v. Atkins†	2019 ND 145	26
2017	THR Minerals, LLC. v. Robinson†	2017 ND 78	25
2014	Desert Partners IV, L.P. v. Benson†	2014 ND 192	25
2014	State v. Boehm†	2014 ND 154	25
2017	State v. Rourke†	2017 ND 102	24
2016	Rath v. Rath†	2016 ND 46	23

Showing the 15 most-cited of 246 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 North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court is Lisa K. Fair McEvers on?: Lisa K. Fair McEvers is a Chief Justice of the North Dakota 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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12 years on the North Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-07-02. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).