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 1987 / Served to 1989

Tony Scarborough

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

Tony Scarborough was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1987. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1946 · age 80
Tenure: 1987–1989 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1987	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Scarborough authored 48 published opinions for the court (1956–1989), plus 12 dissents. Most cited: Silva v. State (162 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. 20 of these were attributed to Scarborough 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
1987	Silva v. State· Dissent†	745 P.2d 380	162
1989	State v. Clark	772 P.2d 322	106
1989	Chavez v. Manville Products Corp.	777 P.2d 371	94
1989	Wilschinsky Ex Rel. Wilschinsky v. Medina· Dissent†	775 P.2d 713	67
1988	National Council on Compensation Insurance v. New Mexico State Corp. Commission· Dissent†	756 P.2d 558	63
1989	Incorporated County of Los Alamos v. Johnson	776 P.2d 1252	55
1989	Jessen v. National Excess Insurance· Dissent†	776 P.2d 1244	48
1987	Green v. General Accident Insurance Co. of America· Dissent†	746 P.2d 152	47
1987	Silva v. Albuquerque Assembly & Distribution Freeport Warehouse Corp.	738 P.2d 513	46
1988	Southwest Community Health Services v. Smith· Dissent†	755 P.2d 40	41
1987	Fuson v. State	735 P.2d 1138	37
1988	McCarty v. State· Dissent†	763 P.2d 360	34
1987	Baca v. State· Dissent†	742 P.2d 1043	33
1987	March v. State· Dissent†	734 P.2d 231	30
1987	State v. Earnest	744 P.2d 539	23

Showing the 15 most-cited of 60 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 Tony Scarborough on?: Tony Scarborough 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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2 years on the New Mexico Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).