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

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

Iowa Supreme Court / Joined 1978 / Served to 2000

Arthur A. McGiverin

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Arthur A. McGiverin was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1978. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1928 · age 98
Tenure: 1978–2000 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1978	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McGiverin authored 1,662 published opinions for the court (1978–2001), plus 23 dissents and 12 concurrences. Most cited: Hyler v. Garner (320 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. 86 of these were attributed to McGiverin 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
1996	Hyler v. Garner	548 N.W.2d 864	320
1990	In the Interest of L.L.	459 N.W.2d 489	261
1998	State v. Ellis	578 N.W.2d 655	232
1993	State v. Thornton	498 N.W.2d 670	202
1992	State v. McKettrick	480 N.W.2d 52	168
1992	In the Interest of M.M.	483 N.W.2d 812	154
1997	State v. Maghee	573 N.W.2d 1	131
1979	State v. Hildebrand· Concurrence†	280 N.W.2d 393	129
1995	State v. Halliburton	539 N.W.2d 339	121
1991	Jones v. State	479 N.W.2d 265	121
1998	State v. Hildreth	582 N.W.2d 167	117
1991	Iowa Fuel & Minerals, Inc. v. Iowa State Board of Regents	471 N.W.2d 859	117
1981	Barnhill v. Davis	300 N.W.2d 104	113
1996	State v. Thomas	547 N.W.2d 223	112
1999	Vivian v. Madison	601 N.W.2d 872	111

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,697 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 Iowa Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Arthur A. McGiverin on?: Arthur A. McGiverin was a Justice of the Iowa 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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22 years on the Iowa Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).