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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Court of Appeals of North Carolina / Joined 1974 / Served to 1998

S Gerald Arnold

Judge, Court of Appeals of North Carolina

S Gerald Arnold was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1974–1998 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1974	Court of Appeals of North Carolina	–	–

Education

East Carolina University

Judicial Record

In our data, Arnold authored 1,145 published opinions for the court (1974–1998), plus 20 dissents and 11 concurrences. Most cited: Sides v. Duke University (173 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. 542 of these were attributed to Arnold 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
1985	Sides v. Duke University· Concurrence†	328 S.E.2d 818	173
1988	Richards v. Town of Valdese	374 S.E.2d 116	88
1990	Hare v. Butler	394 S.E.2d 231	74
1982	Buie v. Daniel International Corp.	289 S.E.2d 118	65
1978	Steele v. Steele	244 S.E.2d 466	61
1978	Tart v. Walker	248 S.E.2d 736	57
1990	Chicopee, Inc. v. Sims Metal Works, Inc.	391 S.E.2d 211	54
1984	Colony Hill Condominium I Ass'n v. Colony Co.	320 S.E.2d 273	51
1977	Nationwide Mutual Insurance v. Knight Ex Rel. Johnson	237 S.E.2d 341	49
1993	Smith v. Smith	433 S.E.2d 196	48
1985	Weaver v. Weaver	324 S.E.2d 915	48
1994	Clark v. Burke County	450 S.E.2d 747	47
1984	Snipes v. Jackson	316 S.E.2d 657	47
1979	Hankins v. Somers	251 S.E.2d 640	40
1998	Brown v. Family Dollar Distribution Center	499 S.E.2d 197	39

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,176 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 Court of Appeals of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was S Gerald Arnold on?: S Gerald Arnold was a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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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24 years on the Court of Appeals of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).