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 1948 / Served to 1954

Samuel James Ervin Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Samuel James Ervin Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1948. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1896–1985
Tenure: 1948–1954 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1948	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Harvard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Ervin authored 286 published opinions for the court (1948–1954), plus 5 dissents. Most cited: Veazey v. City of Durham (695 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. 17 of these were attributed to Ervin 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
1950	Veazey v. City of Durham	57 S.E.2d 377	695
1954	State v. McClain	81 S.E.2d 364	319
1951	Anderson v. Northwestern Motor Co.	64 S.E.2d 265	202
1950	Henry v. A. C. Lawrence Leather Co.	57 S.E.2d 760	198
1948	Young v. . Whitehall Co.	49 S.E.2d 797	134
1949	State v. Ballance†	229 N.C. 764	130
1949	State v. . Ballance	51 S.E.2d 731	127
1951	Woodard v. Mordecai	67 S.E.2d 639	124
1951	State v. Rogers	64 S.E.2d 572	123
1949	Bundy v. . Powell	51 S.E.2d 307	118
1949	Lide v. Mears	56 S.E.2d 404	116
1952	State v. Minton	68 S.E.2d 844	97
1951	State v. Carter	65 S.E.2d 9	88
1951	Council v. Dickerson's, Inc.	64 S.E.2d 551	80
1952	Erickson v. Starling	71 S.E.2d 384	74

Showing the 15 most-cited of 291 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 Samuel James Ervin Jr. on?: Samuel James Ervin Jr. 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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6 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).