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 1987 / Served to 1997

Richard E. Ransom

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Richard E. Ransom was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1987. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1932 · age 94
Tenure: 1987–1997 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1987	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Georgetown University

Judicial Record

In our data, Ransom authored 242 published opinions for the court (1987–1997), plus 16 dissents and 36 concurrences. Most cited: Swafford v. State (537 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. 80 of these were attributed to Ransom 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
1991	Swafford v. State	810 P.2d 1223	537
1997	State v. Gomez	932 P.2d 1	466
1994	State v. Attaway	870 P.2d 103	264
1991	Herron v. State	805 P.2d 624	208
1996	Key v. Chrysler Motors Corp.· Concurrence†	918 P.2d 350	202
1995	State v. Rowell	908 P.2d 1379	191
1992	State v. Orosco· Concurrence†	833 P.2d 1146	169
1994	State v. Wilson	867 P.2d 1175	165
1987	Silva v. State	745 P.2d 380	162
1991	C.R. Anthony Co. v. Loretto Mall Partners	817 P.2d 238	159
1993	State v. Gutierrez	863 P.2d 1052	150
1991	Govich v. North American Systems, Inc.	814 P.2d 94	146
1995	Torres v. State	894 P.2d 386	145
1995	State v. Meadors· Concurrence†	908 P.2d 731	143
1991	State v. Chamberlain· Concurrence†	819 P.2d 673	135

Showing the 15 most-cited of 294 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 was Richard E. Ransom on?: Richard E. Ransom was 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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10 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).