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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

New Mexico Supreme Court / Joined 1984 / Served to 1988

Mary Coon Walters

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Mary Coon Walters was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1984. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1922–2001
Tenure: 1984–1988 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1984	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Walters authored 128 published opinions for the court (1979–1988), plus 18 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Schear v. Board of County Commissioners (155 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. 59 of these were attributed to Walters 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
1984	Schear v. Board of County Commissioners	687 P.2d 728	155
1984	State v. Martin· Concurrence†	686 P.2d 937	152
1988	Melnick v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance	749 P.2d 1105	145
1988	Richardson Ex Rel. Estate of Richardson v. Carnegie Library Restaurant, Inc.	763 P.2d 1153	101
1985	Ledbetter v. Webb	711 P.2d 874	97
1985	Newsome v. Farer	708 P.2d 327	92
1987	Valdez v. Cillessen & Son, Inc.	734 P.2d 1258	85
1985	United Nuclear Corp. v. Allendale Mutual Insurance· Dissent†	709 P.2d 649	82
1985	General Motors Acceptance Corp. v. Anaya	703 P.2d 169	77
1985	Estep v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance	703 P.2d 882	64
1987	Miller v. New Mexico Department of Transportation	741 P.2d 1374	61
1986	State v. Ball· Dissent†	718 P.2d 686	58
1985	Guthmann v. La Vida Llena	709 P.2d 675	58
1988	Ashlock v. Sunwest Bank of Roswell, N.A.	753 P.2d 346	54
1986	Boone v. State· Dissent†	731 P.2d 366	53

Showing the 15 most-cited of 156 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 Mexico Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Mary Coon Walters on?: Mary Coon Walters was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

4 years on the New Mexico Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).