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 1913 / Served to 1924

Byron W. Preston

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Byron W. Preston was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1913. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1913–1924 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1913	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Preston authored 600 published opinions for the court (1913–1924), plus 21 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Tonn (98 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. 610 of these were attributed to Preston 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
1923	State v. Tonn· Dissent†	195 Iowa 94	98
1920	Davis v. Van Camp Packing Co.†	189 Iowa 775	71
1915	Weber v. Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad· Dissent†	175 Iowa 358	55
1921	State v. Walker· Concurrence†	192 Iowa 823	47
1922	State v. Roby†	194 Iowa 1032	44
1917	Ogg v. Robb†	181 Iowa 145	41
1924	State v. Burris†	198 Iowa 1156	36
1914	State v. Madden†	170 Iowa 230	35
1923	State v. Rowley· Dissent†	197 Iowa 977	31
1920	Reid v. Automatic Electric Washer Co.†	189 Iowa 964	31
1914	Helwig v. Fogelsong†	166 Iowa 715	31
1914	State v. Ockij†	165 Iowa 237	30
1919	Matson v. Matson†	186 Iowa 607	29
1913	Fowle v. Parsons†	160 Iowa 454	29
1914	State v. Hutchinson Ice Cream Co.†	168 Iowa 1	28

Showing the 15 most-cited of 628 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 Byron W. Preston on?: Byron W. Preston was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court.

Sources

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

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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).