How do judges of the New Hampshire Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

New Hampshire Supreme Court / Joined 1981 / Served to 1995

William F. Batchelder

Justice, New Hampshire Supreme Court

William F. Batchelder was a Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1981. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1926 · age 100
Tenure: 1981–1995 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1981	New Hampshire Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of New Haven
Boston University

Judicial Record

In our data, Batchelder authored 452 published opinions for the court (1981–1995), plus 24 dissents and 17 concurrences. Most cited: Vogel v. Vogel (443 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. 454 of these were attributed to Batchelder 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
1993	Vogel v. Vogel†	137 N.H. 321	443
1986	Smith v. Cote†	128 N.H. 231	91
1983	State v. Sands· Dissent†	123 N.H. 570	70
1992	Short v. School Administrative Unit No. 16· Concurrence†	136 N.H. 76	68
1990	State v. Pellicci· Dissent†	133 N.H. 523	65
1984	Siciliano v. Capitol City Shows, Inc.†	124 N.H. 719	59
1983	Daboul v. Town of Hampton†	124 N.H. 307	58
1983	Noddin v. Noddin	123 N.H. 73	58
1995	Aranson v. Schroeder†	140 N.H. 359	52
1986	Pillsbury-Flood v. Portsmouth Hospital†	128 N.H. 299	51
1983	Plante v. Engel†	124 N.H. 213	51
1982	Kingsbury v. Smith	122 N.H. 237	51
1993	State v. Smart†	136 N.H. 639	50
1994	Clipper Affiliates, Inc. v. Checovich†	138 N.H. 271	47
1982	Stapleford v. Perrin	122 N.H. 1083	47

Showing the 15 most-cited of 493 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 Hampshire Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was William F. Batchelder on?: William F. Batchelder was a Justice of the New Hampshire 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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14 years on the New Hampshire Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).