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 1977 / Served to 1986

William R. Federici

Justice, New Mexico Supreme Court

William R. Federici was a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1917–2009
Tenure: 1977–1986 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	New Mexico Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Federici authored 269 published opinions for the court (1951–1986), plus 1 dissent and 3 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Martin (152 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. 50 of these were attributed to Federici 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
1984	State v. Martin	686 P.2d 937	152
1982	Sells v. State	653 P.2d 162	137
1980	Methola v. County of Eddy	622 P.2d 234	125
1986	Koenig v. Perez	726 P.2d 341	116
1983	Ramirez v. Armstrong	673 P.2d 822	109
1984	Duke City Lumber Co. v. New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board	681 P.2d 717	103
1982	Marchiondo v. Brown	649 P.2d 462	98
1985	Woodson v. Phillips Petroleum Co.	695 P.2d 483	65
1984	State v. Hoxsie	677 P.2d 620	61
1979	F & T CO. v. Woods	594 P.2d 745	58
1985	Kern Ex Rel. Kern v. St. Joseph Hospital, Inc.	697 P.2d 135	57
1982	Foundation Reserve Insurance v. Mullenix	642 P.2d 604	56
1980	Hurley v. Hurley	615 P.2d 256	56
1980	Vickers v. North American Land Developments, Inc.	607 P.2d 603	54
1983	State v. Manzanares	674 P.2d 511	52

Showing the 15 most-cited of 273 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 William R. Federici on?: William R. Federici 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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9 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).