How do judges of the North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

North Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1992 / Former Justice

Dale V. Sandstrom

Justice, North Dakota Supreme Court

Dale V. Sandstrom was a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1992. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1950 · age 76
Tenure: 1992 · 34 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1992	North Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

North Dakota State University-Main Campus
University of North Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, Sandstrom authored 862 published opinions for the court (1993–2017), plus 147 dissents and 158 concurrences. Most cited: Stout v. Stout (120 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. 568 of these were attributed to Sandstrom 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
1997	Stout v. Stout· Dissent†	1997 ND 61	120
1999	Buchholz v. Buchholz	1999 ND 36	116
1994	City of Fairgo v. Thompson	520 N.W.2d 578	102
2013	State v. Holly· Dissent†	2013 ND 94	101
2006	Van Grinsven v. G.R.H.†	711 N.W.2d 587	91
1994	Van Oosting v. Van Oosting	521 N.W.2d 93	85
2006	State v. Woinarowicz· Concurrence†	2006 ND 179	80
1999	Hawkinson v. Hawkinson· Concurrence†	1999 ND 58	77
2002	Olander Contracting Co. v. Gail Wachter Investments	2002 ND 65	75
1995	Heck v. Reed· Concurrence†	529 N.W.2d 155	73
2002	Kelly v. Kelly	2002 ND 37	72
1999	Hurt v. Freeland	1999 ND 12	72
1999	State v. DeCoteau	1999 ND 77	71
2010	State v. Thompson	2010 ND 10	68
2000	State v. Gregg	2000 ND 154	67

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,167 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 North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Dale V. Sandstrom on?: Dale V. Sandstrom was a Justice of the North Dakota 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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34 years on the North Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).