How do judges of the Oregon Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Oregon Supreme Court / Joined 2001 / Active

Thomas A. Balmer

Justice, Oregon Supreme Court

Thomas A. Balmer is a Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, serving since 2001. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1952 · age 74
Tenure: Since 2001 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2001	Oregon Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Oberlin College

Judicial Record

In our data, Balmer authored 205 published opinions for the court (2001–2023), plus 11 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Montez v. Czerniak (170 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. 128 of these were attributed to Balmer 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
2014	Montez v. Czerniak†	355 Or. 1	170
2009	State v. Rodriguez/Buck	217 P.3d 659	151
2011	Farmers Ins. Co. of Oregon v. Mowry	261 P.3d 1	138
2002	Lichau v. Baldwin	39 P.3d 851	126
2004	Oregon Steel Mills, Inc. v. Coopers & Lybrand, LLP†	83 P.3d 322	117
2014	State v. Unger†	356 Or. 59	113
2004	State v. Amaya†	89 P.3d 1163	110
2012	State v. Klein†	352 Or. 302	80
2011	Strawn v. Farmers Ins. Co. of Oregon· Dissent†	258 P.3d 1199	78
2004	State v. Dilts	103 P.3d 95	77
2016	Espinoza v. Evergreen Helicopters, Inc.†	359 Or. 63	73
2004	Yancy v. Shatzer· Concurrence†	97 P.3d 1161	72
2022	Watkins v. Ackley	370 Or. 604	71
2003	Shoup v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.	61 P.3d 928	69
2005	State v. Gibson	113 P.3d 423	67

Showing the 15 most-cited of 226 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 Oregon Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court is Thomas A. Balmer on?: Thomas A. Balmer is a Justice of the Oregon 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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24 years on the Oregon Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).