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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of North Carolina / Joined 1934 / Served to 1948

Michael Schenck

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Michael Schenck was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1934. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1876–1948
Tenure: 1934–1948 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1934	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Judicial Record

In our data, Schenck authored 567 published opinions for the court (1934–1947), plus 5 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Beach v. . Patton (58 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. 39 of these were attributed to Schenck 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
1935	Beach v. . Patton	179 S.E. 446	58
1935	Holland v. Southern Public Utilities Co.	180 S.E. 592	54
1941	Bullington v. . Angel	16 S.E.2d 411	45
1942	Star Manufacturing Co. v. Atlantic Coast Line Railroad	23 S.E.2d 32	41
1944	Watkins v. Taylor Furnishing Co.	31 S.E.2d 917	40
1938	State v. . Sims	197 S.E. 176	40
1941	State v. . Wagstaff	12 S.E.2d 657	36
1934	Van Landingham Ex Rel. Van Landingham v. Singer Sewing MacHine Co.	177 S.E. 126	35
1944	Benton v. United Bank Building Co.	28 S.E.2d 491	34
1934	Williams v. Blue Ridge Building & Loan Ass'n	177 S.E. 176	34
1937	Lewis v. . Hunter	504 S.E. 814	33
1937	State v. . Smith	189 S.E. 175	33
1943	State v. . Lippard	25 S.E.2d 594	32
1940	State v. . Brackett	11 S.E.2d 146	31
1943	Bailey v. North Carolina Railroad	25 S.E.2d 833	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 573 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 Supreme Court of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Michael Schenck on?: Michael Schenck was a Justice of the Supreme Court 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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14 years on the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).