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 1986 / Former Justice

Brent E. Dickson

Justice, Supreme Court of Indiana

Brent E. Dickson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana, who joined the court in 1986. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1941 · age 85
Tenure: 1986 · 40 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1986	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–

Education

Purdue University-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Dickson authored 766 published opinions for the court (1986–2016), plus 112 dissents and 74 concurrences. Most cited: Cardwell v. State (1,919 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. 321 of these were attributed to Dickson 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
2008	Cardwell v. State· Concurrence†	895 N.E.2d 1219	1,919
2006	Childress v. State· Concurrence†	848 N.E.2d 1073	1,438
1999	Richardson v. State	717 N.E.2d 32	824
2005	McHenry v. State	820 N.E.2d 124	491
1991	Webb v. Jarvis· Concurrence†	575 N.E.2d 992	485
2015	Charles Stephenson v. State of Indiana†	29 N.E.3d 111	437
2006	Voss v. State	856 N.E.2d 1211	379
1998	Broome v. State	694 N.E.2d 280	361
2009	Williams v. Tharp	914 N.E.2d 756	330
2010	Davidson v. State	926 N.E.2d 1023	301
1994	Collins v. Day	644 N.E.2d 72	285
2002	Spivey v. State	761 N.E.2d 831	273
2005	Smylie v. State· Dissent†	823 N.E.2d 679	272
1995	Jordan v. State	656 N.E.2d 816	263
2002	Stevens v. State	770 N.E.2d 739	262

Showing the 15 most-cited of 952 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 Brent E. Dickson on?: Brent E. Dickson 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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40 years on the Supreme Court of Indiana. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).