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 1998 / Active

Petra Jimenez Maes

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Petra Jimenez Maes is a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, serving since 1998. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1947 · age 79
Tenure: Since 1998 · 27 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1998	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Maes authored 126 published opinions for the court (1999–2019), plus 8 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Garza (277 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. 52 of these were attributed to Maes 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
2009	State v. Garza	212 P.3d 387	277
2010	Kersey v. Hatch	237 P.3d 683	207
2012	State v. Largo	278 P.3d 532	177
2009	State v. Chavez· Concurrence†	211 P.3d 891	162
2004	Ocana v. American Furniture Co.	91 P.3d 58	159
2001	Gunaji v. MacIas	31 P.3d 1008	136
2007	State v. Grogan	163 P.3d 494	125
2011	State v. Cabezuela†	2011 NMSC 41	120
2007	Smith v. City of Santa Fe	171 P.3d 300	118
2007	State v. Otto	157 P.3d 8	116
1999	State v. Hester	979 P.2d 729	113
2002	Tercero v. ROMAN CATH. DIOCESE OF NORWICH	48 P.3d 50	107
2005	State v. Duran	120 P.3d 836	106
2008	State v. Downey	195 P.3d 1244	103
2009	State v. Chavarria	208 P.3d 896	102

Showing the 15 most-cited of 141 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 is Petra Jimenez Maes on?: Petra Jimenez Maes is 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

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27 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).