How do judges of the North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

North Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1939 / Served to 1966

Thomas Joseph Burke

Justice, North Dakota Supreme Court

Thomas Joseph Burke was a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1939. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1896–1966
Tenure: 1939–1966 · 27 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1939	North Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Harvard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Burke authored 534 published opinions for the court (1925–1966), plus 24 dissents and 19 concurrences. Most cited: Froh v. Hein (55 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. 52 of these were attributed to Burke 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
1949	Froh v. Hein	39 N.W.2d 11	55
1950	State v. Pusch· Dissent†	46 N.W.2d 508	54
1934	State Ex Rel. Olson v. Langer	256 N.W. 377	43
1947	Agrest v. Agrest· Concurrence	27 N.W.2d 697	42
1948	Persellin v. State Automobile Insurance Ass'n	32 N.W.2d 644	41
1935	State Ex Rel. Sathre v. Moodie	258 N.W. 558	41
1950	Ferderer v. Northern Pacific Railway Co.· Dissent†	42 N.W.2d 216	38
1957	Iszler v. Jorda	80 N.W.2d 665	37
1956	State v. Severson	75 N.W.2d 316	37
1933	McCurdy v. Hughes	248 N.W. 512	34
1965	Perry v. Erling· Dissent†	132 N.W.2d 889	33
1955	State v. Tjaden· Concurrence†	69 N.W.2d 272	33
1926	Meyer v. Russell	214 N.W. 857	33
1961	Knoepfle v. Suko	108 N.W.2d 456	32
1950	O'CONNOR v. Immele	43 N.W.2d 649	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 579 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 North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Thomas Joseph Burke on?: Thomas Joseph Burke was a Justice of the North Dakota 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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27 years on the North Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).