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 2019 / Active

Christopher McDonald

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Christopher McDonald is a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, serving since 2019. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2019 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2019	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McDonald authored 3 published opinions for the court (2019), plus 1 dissent and 1 concurrence. Most cited: State of Iowa v. Peter Leroy Veal (86 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. 5 of these were attributed to McDonald 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
2019	State of Iowa v. Peter Leroy Veal· Concurrence†	930 N.W.2d 293	86
2019	Joshua Venckus v. City of Iowa City†	930 N.W.2d 792	42
2019	George E. Struve, by Substitute Dianne Lawrence, Paul Struve, and Ronald Struve v. Perry Struve and Clayton Struve†	930 N.W.2d 368	24
2019	Keith Puntenney, Laverne I. Johnson, Richard R. Lamb, Marian D. Johnson, Northwest Iowa Landowners Association, Iowa Farmland Owners Association, Inc., and the Sierra Club Iowa Chapter v. Iowa Utilities Board, and Office of Consumer Advocate and The Main Coalition, and Dakota Access, LLC· Dissent†	928 N.W.2d 829	19
2019	State of Iowa v. Keegan Craig Smith†	926 N.W.2d 760	10

Showing the 5 most-cited of 5 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 is Christopher McDonald on?: Christopher McDonald is a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court.

Sources

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

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7 years on the Iowa Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-07-02. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).