How do judges of the North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

North Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1966 / Served to 1983

William L. Paulson

Justice, North Dakota Supreme Court

William L. Paulson was a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1966. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1913–2000
Tenure: 1966–1983 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1966	North Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of North Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, Paulson authored 424 published opinions for the court (1967–1994), plus 9 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: Hughes v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. (111 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. 48 of these were attributed to Paulson 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
1975	Hughes v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co.	236 N.W.2d 870	111
1977	O'Leary v. Coenen	251 N.W.2d 746	90
1979	Wall v. Pennsylvania Life Insurance Co.	274 N.W.2d 208	77
1980	South v. National Railroad Passenger Corp.	290 N.W.2d 819	63
1972	Ferguson v. Ferguson	202 N.W.2d 760	61
1980	State v. Carpenter	301 N.W.2d 106	60
1979	Reiling v. Bhattacharyya	276 N.W.2d 237	60
1983	State v. Brown	337 N.W.2d 138	58
1970	Kinsella v. Kinsella	181 N.W.2d 764	56
1980	State v. Sheldon	301 N.W.2d 604	55
1983	State v. Jensen	333 N.W.2d 686	51
1978	Metcalf v. Security International Insurance Co.	261 N.W.2d 795	50
1975	Larson v. Larson	234 N.W.2d 861	50
1980	State v. Phelps	297 N.W.2d 769	48
1981	Johnson v. Monsanto Co.	303 N.W.2d 86	47

Showing the 15 most-cited of 438 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 North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was William L. Paulson on?: William L. Paulson was a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

17 years on the North Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).