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 1979 / Served to 1980

Walter E. Brock Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina

Walter E. Brock Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who joined the court in 1979. He previously served on the Court of Appeals of North Carolina. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1916 · age 110
Tenure: 1979–1980 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1973	Court of Appeals of North Carolina	–	–
1979	Supreme Court of North Carolina	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Brock authored 624 published opinions for the court (1968–1980), plus 10 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Stanback v. Stanback (430 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. 255 of these were attributed to Brock 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
1979	Stanback v. Stanback	254 S.E.2d 611	430
1975	Hyde Insurance Agency, Inc. v. Dixie Leasing Corp.	215 S.E.2d 162	135
1980	Tanglewood Land Co., Inc. v. Byrd	261 S.E.2d 655	125
1977	Love v. Pressley	239 S.E.2d 574	98
1979	State v. Thompson	252 S.E.2d 776	94
1979	A-S-P Associates v. City of Raleigh	258 S.E.2d 444	93
1980	State v. Avery	261 S.E.2d 803	85
1968	Harless v. Flynn	162 S.E.2d 47	74
1974	Whitley v. Cubberly· Dissent†	210 S.E.2d 289	68
1980	Bell v. Martin	264 S.E.2d 101	50
1979	Edwards v. Northwestern Bank	250 S.E.2d 651	46
1978	Harris & Gurganus, Inc. v. Williams	246 S.E.2d 791	41
1979	Moore v. Moore	252 S.E.2d 735	40
1972	Goble v. Bounds	186 S.E.2d 638	40
1980	State v. Leonard	266 S.E.2d 631	39

Showing the 15 most-cited of 640 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 Walter E. Brock Jr. on?: Walter E. Brock Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

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1 year 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).