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 1966 / Served to 1981

William Alvan Grimes

Justice, New Hampshire Supreme Court

William Alvan Grimes was a Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1966. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1911–1999
Tenure: 1966–1981 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1966	New Hampshire Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of New Haven
Boston University

Judicial Record

In our data, Grimes authored 350 published opinions for the court (1967–1981), plus 49 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: Monge v. Beebe Rubber Co. (299 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. 164 of these were attributed to Grimes 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
1974	Monge v. Beebe Rubber Co.· Dissent†	114 N.H. 130	299
1979	Corso v. Merrill· Dissent†	119 N.H. 647	144
1976	Ouellette v. Blanchard· Dissent†	116 N.H. 552	99
1969	Buttrick v. Arthur Lessard & Sons, Inc.· Dissent†	110 N.H. 36	76
1978	State v. Wentworth	118 N.H. 832	74
1981	Burrows v. City of Keene	121 N.H. 590	66
1977	State v. Phinney	117 N.H. 145	59
1976	State v. Ruelke	116 N.H. 692	52
1978	Smith v. State	118 N.H. 764	51
1978	State v. Dorsey	118 N.H. 844	49
1973	Stone v. Shea· Concurrence†	113 N.H. 174	48
1978	State v. Hogg	118 N.H. 262	44
1978	State v. LeClair	118 N.H. 214	44
1977	Metzger v. Town of Brentwood	117 N.H. 497	44
1973	State v. Blake	113 N.H. 115	44

Showing the 15 most-cited of 408 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 Alvan Grimes on?: William Alvan Grimes 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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15 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).