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 1864 / Served to 1876

Chester C. Cole

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Chester C. Cole was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1864. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1864–1876 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1864	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cole authored 715 published opinions for the court (1864–1876), plus 23 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: Wright v. Illinois & Mississippi Telegraph Co. (142 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. 741 of these were attributed to Cole 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
1866	Wright v. Illinois & Mississippi Telegraph Co.†	20 Iowa 195	142
1871	Artz v. Chicago, R. I. & P. R. R.†	34 Iowa 153	84
1873	Pangborn v. Westlake†	36 Iowa 546	76
1875	District Township of Boomer v. French†	40 Iowa 601	70
1869	Eldridge v. Kuehl†	27 Iowa 160	60
1872	Deppe v. Chicago, R. I. & P. R. Co.†	36 Iowa 52	59
1868	State v. Squires†	26 Iowa 340	59
1864	City of Davenport v. Peoria Marine & Fire Insurance†	17 Iowa 276	58
1875	State v. Brandt· Separate†	41 Iowa 593	55
1871	Dewey v. Chicago & N. W. R. R.†	31 Iowa 373	54
1874	City of Dubuque v. Illinois Central Railroad· Dissent†	39 Iowa 56	53
1870	Scully v. Scully's†	28 Iowa 548	53
1869	Close v. Samm†	27 Iowa 503	50
1868	Roberts v. Austin Corbin & Co.†	26 Iowa 315	50
1866	Turner v. Hitchcock· Concurrence†	20 Iowa 310	50

Showing the 15 most-cited of 745 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 Chester C. Cole on?: Chester C. Cole 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

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

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).