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

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Colorado Supreme Court / Joined 1998 / Former Justice

Nancy E. Rice

Justice, Colorado Supreme Court

Nancy E. Rice was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1998. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1950 · age 76
Tenure: 1998 · 28 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1998	Colorado Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Rice authored 303 published opinions for the court (1998–2018), plus 30 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Hagos v. People (6,030 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. 192 of these were attributed to Rice 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
2012	Hagos v. People†	288 P.3d 116	6,030
2010	Wend v. People	235 P.3d 1089	2,036
1999	People v. Sprouse	983 P.2d 771	1,564
2001	In Re the Marriage of Balanson	25 P.3d 28	1,454
2007	Dunlap v. People†	173 P.3d 1054	1,343
2000	People v. Antonio-Antimo	29 P.3d 298	1,021
2002	Masters v. People	58 P.3d 979	936
2018	Norton v. Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood, Inc.†	2018 CO 3	863
2001	People v. Shreck	22 P.3d 68	854
2009	Yusem v. People†	210 P.3d 458	842
2006	People v. Johnson	142 P.3d 722	842
2001	People v. Garcia†	28 P.3d 340	840
2013	Bedor v. Johnson†	292 P.3d 924	818
2011	Denver Post Corp. v. Ritter· Dissent†	255 P.3d 1083	787
2017	Romero v. People†	2017 CO 37	780

Showing the 15 most-cited of 339 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 Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Nancy E. Rice on?: Nancy E. Rice was a Justice of the Colorado 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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28 years on the Colorado Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).