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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Idaho Supreme Court / Joined 1968 / Served to 1987

Charles R. Donaldson

Justice, Idaho Supreme Court

Charles R. Donaldson was a Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1968. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1922–1987
Tenure: 1968–1987 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1968	Idaho Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Donaldson authored 490 published opinions for the court (1969–1987), plus 36 dissents and 34 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Nice (549 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. 129 of these were attributed to Donaldson 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
1982	State v. Nice	645 P.2d 323	549
1979	Minich v. Gem State Developers, Inc.· Concurrence†	591 P.2d 1078	436
1986	Quick v. Crane	727 P.2d 1187	312
1978	State v. Wolfe	582 P.2d 728	302
1971	State v. Haggard	486 P.2d 260	202
1969	Clark v. State	452 P.2d 54	183
1983	Cheney v. Palos Verdes Investment Corp.· Concurrence†	665 P.2d 661	162
1970	Smith v. State	473 P.2d 937	153
1979	State v. Needs	591 P.2d 130	146
1986	State v. Johnson· Concurrence†	716 P.2d 1288	142
1984	Stephens v. Stearns	678 P.2d 41	138
1980	Alegria v. Payonk	619 P.2d 135	135
1985	State v. Windsor	716 P.2d 1182	131
1976	State v. Colyer	557 P.2d 626	128
1986	Sivak v. State	731 P.2d 192	125

Showing the 15 most-cited of 561 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 Charles R. Donaldson on?: Charles R. Donaldson 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

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19 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).