How do judges of the Supreme Court of Indiana reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Indiana / Joined 1854 / Served to 1855

Alvin P. Hovey

Justice, Supreme Court of Indiana

Alvin P. Hovey was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana (5 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1854. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1821–1891
Tenure: 1854–1855

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1854	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hovey authored 42 published opinions for the court (1854). Most cited: Wright v. State (58 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. 42 of these were attributed to Hovey 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
1854	Wright v. State†	5 Ind. 290	58
1854	Greencastle Township v. Black†	5 Ind. 557	56
1854	Langdon v. Applegate†	5 Ind. 327	30
1854	Johnson v. Stebbins†	5 Ind. 364	19
1854	Common Council of Richmond v. State ex rel. Mendenhall†	5 Ind. 334	19
1854	Cory v. Silcox†	5 Ind. 370	18
1854	Falkenburgh v. Jones†	5 Ind. 296	18
1854	Matlock v. Matlock†	5 Ind. 403	14
1854	McKinney v. Pierce†	5 Ind. 422	10
1854	Cory v. Silcox†	6 Ind. 39	9
1854	Kelley v. Dillon†	5 Ind. 426	9
1854	Weatherly v. Higgins†	6 Ind. 73	8
1854	Rank v. Hanna†	6 Ind. 20	8
1854	Rogers v. State†	6 Ind. 31	6
1854	Anderson v. Fry†	6 Ind. 76	5

Showing the 15 most-cited of 42 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 Supreme Court of Indiana reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Alvin P. Hovey on?: Alvin P. Hovey was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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Joined the court in 1854. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).