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 1876 / Served to 1887

Austin Adams

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Austin Adams was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1876. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1826–1890
Tenure: 1876–1887 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1876	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Adams authored 1,113 published opinions for the court (1876–1887), plus 57 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Powers v. City of Council Bluffs (75 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. 1,175 of these were attributed to Adams 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
1877	Powers v. City of Council Bluffs†	45 Iowa 652	75
1884	Hollis v. State Insurance· Dissent†	65 Iowa 454	59
1879	Calwell v. City of Boone†	51 Iowa 687	53
1876	Morris v. C., B. & Q. R. Co.†	45 Iowa 29	46
1883	Parkhill v. Town of Brighton†	61 Iowa 103	45
1881	State v. Hamilton· Dissent†	57 Iowa 596	45
1886	State v. Hockett· Dissent†	70 Iowa 442	42
1878	Fuller & Co. v. Hunt†	48 Iowa 163	40
1883	Leaver v. Gauss†	62 Iowa 314	38
1882	Chambers v. Watson· Dissent†	60 Iowa 339	36
1880	Boone County v. Jones· Separate†	54 Iowa 699	36
1877	Dillon v. Allen· Dissent†	46 Iowa 299	36
1885	State v. Ormiston†	66 Iowa 143	35
1883	State v. Cole†	63 Iowa 695	35
1884	Drake v. Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway Co.†	63 Iowa 302	34

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,180 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 Austin Adams on?: Austin Adams 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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11 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).