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 1985 / Served to 1999

William R. Johnson

Justice, New Hampshire Supreme Court

William R. Johnson was a Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1930–2009
Tenure: 1985–1999 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	New Hampshire Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Dartmouth College
Harvard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Johnson authored 418 published opinions for the court (1985–1999), plus 8 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Atwood v. Owens (133 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. 436 of these were attributed to Johnson 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
1997	Atwood v. Owens†	142 N.H. 396	133
1991	Morancy v. Morancy†	134 N.H. 493	98
1987	Phelps v. Kingston†	130 N.H. 166	81
1992	Coakley v. Maine Bonding & Casualty Co.†	136 N.H. 402	74
1992	State v. Gagne†	136 N.H. 101	70
1987	Eastern Marine Construction Corp. v. First Southern Leasing, Ltd.†	129 N.H. 270	70
1988	Keeton v. Hustler Magazine, Inc.†	131 N.H. 6	68
1987	Aubert v. Aubert†	129 N.H. 422	66
1993	Independent Mechanical Contractors, Inc. v. Gordon T. Burke & Sons, Inc.†	138 N.H. 110	65
1990	State v. Pellicci†	133 N.H. 523	65
1991	Brannigan v. Usitalo†	134 N.H. 50	59
1995	State v. Canelo· Concurrence†	139 N.H. 376	50
1999	Douglas v. Douglas†	143 N.H. 419	49
1998	Konefal v. Hollis/Brookline Cooperative School District†	143 N.H. 256	49
1987	State v. Cote†	129 N.H. 358	49

Showing the 15 most-cited of 436 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 R. Johnson on?: William R. Johnson 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).