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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of North Carolina / Joined 1829 / Served to 1859

Thomas Ruffin Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Thomas Ruffin Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1829. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1787–1870
Tenure: 1829–1859 · 30 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1829	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Ruffin authored 1,746 published opinions for the court (1817–1883), plus 4 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Hoke v. . Henderson (117 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. 96 of these were attributed to Ruffin 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
1833	Hoke v. . Henderson	15 N.C. 1	117
1881	Knight v. . Houghtalling	85 N.C. 17	76
1881	State v. . Efler	85 N.C. 585	60
1881	McLeod v. . Bullard	84 N.C. 515	56
1882	State v. . Nash	86 N.C. 650	48
1882	Sutton v. . Schonwald	86 N.C. 198	43
1883	Dougherty v. . Sprinkle	88 N.C. 300	42
1881	Tuttle v. . Harrill	85 N.C. 456	41
1881	McDonald v. . Dickson	85 N.C. 248	40
1881	Scott v. . Battle	85 N.C. 184	38
1883	Britton v. Atlanta & Charlotte Air-Line Railway Co.	88 N.C. 536	37
1830	State v. . Moses	13 N.C. 452	36
1883	Biggs v. Insurance Co. (North Carolina Home)	88 N.C. 141	35
1882	Kennedy v. . Williams	87 N.C. 6	32
1848	Kea v. . Robeson	40 N.C. 373	32

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,791 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 Supreme Court of North Carolina reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Thomas Ruffin Jr. on?: Thomas Ruffin Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court 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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30 years on the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).