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 1937 / Served to 1942

Edward A. Sager

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Edward A. Sager was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1937. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1937–1942 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1937	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Sager authored 183 published opinions for the court (1937–1942), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: Charles Hewitt & Sons Co. v. Keller (38 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. 1 of these was attributed to Sager 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
1937	Charles Hewitt & Sons Co. v. Keller	275 N.W. 94	38
1940	State v. Weltha	292 N.W. 148	33
1938	Hawkins v. Burton	281 N.W. 342	23
1940	Short v. Powell	291 N.W. 406	21
1938	Long v. Northup	279 N.W. 104	21
1940	Thompson v. Schappert	294 N.W. 580	16
1937	White v. Zell	276 N.W. 76	16
1942	Smith v. Iowa Public Service Co.	6 N.W.2d 123	15
1938	In Re Estate of Onstot	277 N.W. 563	15
1939	Usher v. Stafford	288 N.W. 432	14
1938	Larsen v. Burroughs	277 N.W. 463	14
1941	State v. Gillam	300 N.W. 567	13
1941	In Re Estate of Ensminger	296 N.W. 814	13
1939	Caligiuri Ex Rel. Caligiuri v. Des Moines Railway Co.	288 N.W. 702	13
1938	Brien v. Davidson	281 N.W. 150	12

Showing the 15 most-cited of 185 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 Edward A. Sager on?: Edward A. Sager 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

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5 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).