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 2003 / Active

Sanford L. Steelman Jr.

Judge, Court of Appeals of North Carolina

Sanford L. Steelman Jr. is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of North Carolina, serving since 2003. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1951 · age 75
Tenure: Since 2003 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Court of Appeals of North Carolina	–	–

Education

Davidson College

Judicial Record

In our data, Steelman authored 549 published opinions for the court (2003–2015), plus 23 dissents and 42 concurrences. Most cited: Good Hope Hospital, Inc. v. North Carolina Department of Health & Human Services (203 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. 234 of these were attributed to Steelman 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
2005	Good Hope Hospital, Inc. v. North Carolina Department of Health & Human Services	620 S.E.2d 873	203
2009	State v. Osorio	675 S.E.2d 144	179
2009	Laster v. Francis	681 S.E.2d 858	143
2005	In re J.A.A.†	623 S.E.2d 45	127
2008	In re S.N.†	669 S.E.2d 55	81
2003	Broughton v. McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.	588 S.E.2d 20	77
2005	State v. McCoy	615 S.E.2d 319	74
2009	Schlieper v. Johnson	672 S.E.2d 548	67
2004	In Re JS	598 S.E.2d 658	66
2005	In re B.M.†	168 N.C. App. 350	65
2004	In re J.S.†	165 N.C. App. 509	58
2004	In Re O.W.	596 S.E.2d 851	55
2012	Westmoreland v. High Point Healthcare Inc.†	218 N.C. App. 76	53
2007	Watson v. Watson	652 S.E.2d 310	53
2013	Wilkerson v. Duke University†	229 N.C. App. 670	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 614 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 is Sanford L. Steelman Jr. on?: Sanford L. Steelman Jr. is 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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23 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).