A trial court judge in the long and bitter Hutchins v. Hollingworth feud over adjoining Hampton beachfront properties now finds himself in its crosshairs.

Manchester attorney Peter Hutchins and his wife, Kathy, complain that Superior Court Judge John M. Lewis applied for a Supreme Court appointment at the same time he was holding hearings and writing orders in their case against then-Executive Councilor Beverly Hollingworth.

Had Lewis been nominated, the five-member Executive Council would have voted on his appointment. Hutchins says Lewis should have recused himself or disclosed his interest in the job as soon as he applied.

Lewis, who was unavailable for comment, was not nominated for the job by Gov. John Lynch and has written that Hollingworth would have faced a legal responsibility to abstain from a vote had he been nominated.

He has acknowledged he was interested in the Supreme Court job while deciding the Hollingworth case.

“This bothers me to the core as a lawyer,” Hutchins said in an interview this month. “If you don’t have faith the judges are impartial and the courts are impartial, then you just throw the whole system out.”

Hutchins is a former New Hampshire Bar president and prominent personal-injury lawyer. His wife is a well-known Manchester area Realtor.

Their dispute with Hollingworth over property rights at Great Boars Head has played out in the news and in the courts since 2005. Along with the civil lawsuit centering on title and property rights, accusations in related court cases have included alleged trespassing, intimidation, stalking, punctured tires and smashed car windows.

Hutchins has appealed Lewis’ ruling and has asked the state Supreme Court to decide whether Lewis violated judicial codes of ethics by remaining on the case.

Lewis, a 2001 appointee of former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, was out of the country on vacation, according to Laura Kiernan, a spokesman for the court system.

“Neither at the time I first applied for consideration and screening, nor at any time later, did I have any reason to think that Hollingworth would ever figure in any decision-making process involving me and the Supreme Court,” Lewis wrote in April 2011, when he rejected Hutchins’ demand to throw out his order and step down from the case.

Gov. Lynch named Robert Lynn in November 2010, two weeks after Hollingworth, a former state Senate president, lost her reelection to the Executive Council.

But to Hutchins, the issue is an order favorable to Hollingworth that Lewis issued in October 2010. At the time, the court selection process was underway.

The ruling awarded attorney fees for Hollingworth, and Lewis ordered both sides to submit briefs on how much was deserved.

With Hollingworth seeking $107,000 in fees, the order added a monetary incentive for Hollingworth to favor a potential Lewis nomination, Hutchins said.

Judicial ethics rules call for judges to disqualify themselves whenever their impartiality might reasonably be questioned, said Albert “Buzz” Scherr, a professor at the University of New Hampshire Law School.

He said the Hutchins-Lewis matter does not provide a clear call.

Hutchins has a good point on a theoretical basis, he said. But Hollingworth has a good point on a practical basis, Scherr said.

“The further you get from a clear, obvious conflict and the more conditions there are in it, the less clarity it has that the judge’s impartiality should be questioned,” he said.

For her part, Hollingworth said Hutchins has never won a clear-cut decision in their dispute. She said it would have been a misdemeanor for her to vote on a nomination, had Lynch picked Lewis.

“There’s nothing there,” said Hollingworth, who said she did not want to comment because the case is before the Supreme Court.

Kathy Hutchins said she asked Attorney General Michael Delaney to investigate Hollingworth’s role; Delaney would not, she said.

Neither she nor her husband would say whether they have alerted the Judicial Conduct Committee to the matter.

Complaints are confidential in the early stages, and no such complaint was available last week when a reporter inquired.