How do judges of the Montana Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Montana Supreme Court / Joined 2009 / Served to 2016

Mike McGrath

Justice, Montana Supreme Court

Mike McGrath was a Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2009. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2009–2016 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2009	Montana Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Gonzaga University

Judicial Record

In our data, McGrath authored 318 published opinions for the court (2004–2016), plus 8 dissents and 21 concurrences. Most cited: State v. HEAFNER (60 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. 201 of these were attributed to McGrath 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
2010	State v. HEAFNER	2010 MT 87	60
2015	Milky Whey, Inc. v. Dairy Partners, LLC· Dissent†	2015 MT 18	49
2012	State v. Ellison	2012 MT 50	48
2014	Morrow v. Bank of America, N.A.†	2014 MT 117	44
2016	State v. W. Lawrence· Dissent†	2016 MT 346	40
2013	In re D.S.B.†	370 Mont. 37	37
2009	State v. Hernandez· Concurrence†	2009 MT 341	37
2009	In re C.M.C.†	350 Mont. 391	36
2015	State v. McClelland†	2015 MT 281	33
2015	State v. Spady†	2015 MT 218	33
2009	Malcolm v. EVENFLO CO., INC.· Concurrence†	2009 MT 285	32
2011	Touris v. Flathead County	2011 MT 165	31
2009	State v. Richard Crosley†	2009 MT 126	31
2010	State v. Stout	2010 MT 137	30
2010	State v. Larson	2010 MT 236	29

Showing the 15 most-cited of 347 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 Montana Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Mike McGrath on?: Mike McGrath was a Justice of the Montana 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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7 years on the Montana Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).