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 1960 / Served to 1969

Merrill Emmett Noble

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Merrill Emmett Noble was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1960. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1896–1969
Tenure: 1960–1969 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1960	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Education

New Mexico Highlands University

Judicial Record

In our data, Noble authored 255 published opinions for the court (1960–1969), plus 23 dissents and 11 concurrences. Most cited: Tapia v. Panhandle Steel Erectors Company (174 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. 62 of these were attributed to Noble 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
1967	Tapia v. Panhandle Steel Erectors Company	428 P.2d 625	174
1966	State v. Nance	419 P.2d 242	119
1962	Woods v. Brumlop	377 P.2d 520	99
1969	LeClert v. LeClert	453 P.2d 755	83
1961	Reed v. Styron	365 P.2d 912	72
1968	Peyton v. Nord· Concurrence†	437 P.2d 716	71
1962	Bradbury & Stamm Construction Co. v. Bureau of Revenue	372 P.2d 808	69
1962	Montano v. Saavedra	373 P.2d 824	66
1964	City of Santa Fe v. Gamble-Skogmo, Inc.	389 P.2d 13	64
1967	State v. Moser	430 P.2d 106	60
1963	State v. Lott	387 P.2d 855	54
1967	City of Raton v. Sproule· Dissent†	429 P.2d 336	53
1964	State v. Vaughn	393 P.2d 711	52
1962	Fitzgerald v. Fitzgerald	369 P.2d 398	52
1965	Gruschus Ex Rel. Estate of Adams v. Bureau of Revenue	399 P.2d 105	51

Showing the 15 most-cited of 289 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 Merrill Emmett Noble on?: Merrill Emmett Noble was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court.

Sources

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

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9 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).