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 1970 / Served to 1970

Thomas F. McKenna

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Thomas F. McKenna was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1970. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1921–1996
Tenure: 1970–1970

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1970	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McKenna authored 13 published opinions for the court (1970). Most cited: Cave v. Cave (86 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. 1 of these was attributed to McKenna 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
1970	Cave v. Cave	474 P.2d 480	86
1970	Durrett v. Petritsis	474 P.2d 487	38
1970	Greer v. Salmon	479 P.2d 294	31
1970	State Ex Rel. Maloney v. Sierra	477 P.2d 301	27
1970	Clinard v. Southern Pacific Company	475 P.2d 321	25
1970	Tafoya v. New Mexico State Police Board	472 P.2d 973	20
1970	Petritsis v. Simpier	474 P.2d 490	16
1970	Terry v. Terry	476 P.2d 772	13
1970	Southwestern Portland Cement v. Beavers	478 P.2d 546	10
1970	Williams v. State†	81 N.M. 605	9
1970	State v. French	478 P.2d 537	5
1970	Guthrie v. US Lime and Mining Corporation	477 P.2d 817	5
1970	Voisen v. Kantor	469 P.2d 709	4

Showing the 13 most-cited of 13 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 Thomas F. McKenna on?: Thomas F. McKenna 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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Joined the court in 1970. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).