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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Idaho Supreme Court / Joined 1942 / Served to 1945

Ben Samuel Dunlap

Justice, Idaho Supreme Court

Ben Samuel Dunlap was a Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1942. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1888 · age 138
Tenure: 1942–1945 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1942	Idaho Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Dunlap authored 29 published opinions for the court (1942–1980), plus 5 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: State v. Gilbert (66 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 of these was attributed to Dunlap 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
1943	State v. Gilbert	142 P.2d 584	66
1980	State v. Clayton	606 P.2d 1000	56
1944	Durant v. Snyder	151 P.2d 776	48
1944	Checketts v. Thompson	152 P.2d 585	43
1943	Moon v. Ervin	133 P.2d 933	42
1944	Rosenau v. Idaho Mutual Benefit Ass'n	145 P.2d 227	31
1943	Finlayson v. Waller	134 P.2d 1069	31
1943	Summerfield v. Pringle· Dissent	144 P.2d 214	28
1958	Tax Exemption of Sunset Memorial Gardens, Inc. v. Idaho State Tax Commission	327 P.2d 766	26
1977	Rufener v. Shaud	573 P.2d 142	25
1944	Doxstater v. Northwest Cities Gas Co.	154 P.2d 498	23
1944	State v. Finney	150 P.2d 130	22
1943	Hancock v. Halliday	150 P.2d 137	22
1943	McCarty v. Sauer	136 P.2d 742	20
1943	Graham v. Leek	144 P.2d 475	18

Showing the 15 most-cited of 36 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 Idaho Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Ben Samuel Dunlap on?: Ben Samuel Dunlap was a Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

2 years on the Idaho Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).