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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Montana Supreme Court / Joined 1949 / Served to 1961

Raymond V. Bottomly Sr.

Justice, Montana Supreme Court

Raymond V. Bottomly Sr. was a Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1949. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1885–1961
Tenure: 1949–1961 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1949	Montana Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Teachers College at Columbia University

Judicial Record

In our data, Bottomly authored 76 published opinions for the court (1949–1960), plus 46 dissents and 32 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Greeno (57 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. 91 of these were attributed to Bottomly 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
1959	State v. Greeno	342 P.2d 1052	57
1952	State v. Bosch	242 P.2d 477	42
1950	City of Missoula v. Mix	214 P.2d 212	42
1957	Burns v. Fisher· Dissent†	313 P.2d 1044	37
1957	Yurkovich v. Industrial Accident Board	314 P.2d 866	35
1955	Gaffney v. Industrial Accident Board of Montana	287 P.2d 256	34
1951	State ex rel. Irvine v. District Court of Fourth Judicial Dist.†	125 Mont. 398	34
1958	Birnie v. UNITED STATES GYPSUM COMPANY	328 P.2d 133	31
1955	Fey v. A. A. Oil Corp.	285 P.2d 578	30
1950	Hames v. City of Polson	215 P.2d 950	29
1959	Hayward v. Richardson Construction Company· Dissent†	347 P.2d 475	25
1955	State v. Hale· Dissent†	291 P.2d 229	25
1951	Cox v. Williamson	227 P.2d 614	24
1960	State Ex Rel. Livingstone v. Murray	354 P.2d 552	22
1958	Love v. Mon-O-Co Oil Corp.	319 P.2d 1056	22

Showing the 15 most-cited of 154 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 Raymond V. Bottomly Sr. on?: Raymond V. Bottomly Sr. 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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12 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).