How do judges of the Supreme Court of North Carolina reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of North Carolina / Joined 1994 / Served to 2004

Robert F. Orr

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Robert F. Orr was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1994. He previously served on the Court of Appeals of North Carolina. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1946 · age 80
Tenure: 1994–2004 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1986	Court of Appeals of North Carolina	–	–
1994	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Judicial Record

In our data, Orr authored 412 published opinions for the court (1986–2004), plus 34 dissents and 12 concurrences. Most cited: Dalton v. Camp (611 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. 197 of these were attributed to Orr 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
2001	Dalton v. Camp	548 S.E.2d 704	611
1998	Adams v. AVX Corp.	509 S.E.2d 411	424
1997	Meyer v. Walls	489 S.E.2d 880	287
1994	Jeffreys v. Raleigh Oaks Joint Venture	444 S.E.2d 252	268
2000	Deese v. Champion International Corp.	530 S.E.2d 549	243
2002	State v. Jones	558 S.E.2d 97	241
2004	State v. Garcia· Dissent†	597 S.E.2d 724	204
1997	Price v. Howard	484 S.E.2d 528	164
1998	Pulliam v. Smith· Concurrence†	501 S.E.2d 898	148
1996	State v. Gregory	467 S.E.2d 28	143
1997	Leandro v. State· Dissent†	488 S.E.2d 249	132
2003	Shipman v. Shipman· Dissent†	586 S.E.2d 250	131
1987	Harris v. Pembaur	353 S.E.2d 673	128
1997	Saums v. Raleigh Community Hospital	487 S.E.2d 746	125
1999	Sara Lee Corp. v. Carter	519 S.E.2d 308	116

Showing the 15 most-cited of 458 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 Supreme Court of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Robert F. Orr on?: Robert F. Orr was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

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 Supreme Court of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).