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

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

South Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1995 / Former Justice

David E. Gilbertson

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

David E. Gilbertson was a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1995. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1949 · age 77
Tenure: 1995 · 31 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

South Dakota State University
University of South Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, Gilbertson authored 589 published opinions for the court (1986–2019), plus 56 dissents and 60 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Guthrie (123 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. 314 of these were attributed to Gilbertson 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
2001	State v. Guthrie· Concurrence†	627 N.W.2d 401	123
1998	State v. Bonner· Concurrence†	1998 SD 30	87
1996	State v. Moeller· Concurrence†	1996 SD 60	85
1997	Landstrom v. Shaver	1997 SD 25	83
1997	State v. Goodroad	1997 SD 46	77
1999	State v. Smith	1999 SD 83	74
1997	Grynberg v. Citation Oil & Gas Corp.	1997 SD 121	71
1998	Dahn v. Trownsell	1998 SD 36	70
1999	Veeder v. Kennedy	1999 SD 23	69
2007	State v. Buchhold	2007 SD 15	65
1996	Billion v. Billion· Concurrence†	1996 SD 101	65
2000	Holzer v. Dakota Speedway, Inc.	2000 SD 65	64
1996	Grode v. Grode· Concurrence†	1996 SD 15	64
2008	Kirlin v. Halverson	2008 SD 107	62
2002	State v. Tuttle· Concurrence†	2002 SD 94	62

Showing the 15 most-cited of 705 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 South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was David E. Gilbertson on?: David E. Gilbertson was a Justice of the South 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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31 years on the South Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).