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 1971 / Served to 1976

Samuel Z. Montoya

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Samuel Z. Montoya was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1971. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1916–1996
Tenure: 1971–1976 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1971	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Montoya authored 96 published opinions for the court (1962–1976), plus 2 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Hicks v. State (165 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. 25 of these were attributed to Montoya 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
1976	Hicks v. State	544 P.2d 1153	165
1973	State v. Gunzelman†	512 P.2d 55	82
1975	McGeehan v. Bunch	540 P.2d 238	81
1975	State v. Vigil	533 P.2d 578	68
1976	Smith v. State	558 P.2d 39	60
1976	Edens v. New Mexico Health & Social Services Department	547 P.2d 65	55
1972	Tome Land & Improvement Co. v. Silva	494 P.2d 962	54
1976	Michelson v. Michelson	551 P.2d 638	52
1975	Matter of Valdez	540 P.2d 818	49
1973	King v. Travelers Insurance Company	505 P.2d 1226	46
1974	Apodaca v. Wilson	525 P.2d 876	44
1976	Miller v. City of Albuquerque	554 P.2d 665	41
1974	Michelson v. Michelson	520 P.2d 263	41
1973	Aboud v. Adams	507 P.2d 430	39
1972	Proctor v. Waxler	503 P.2d 644	37

Showing the 15 most-cited of 99 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 Samuel Z. Montoya on?: Samuel Z. Montoya 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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5 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).