How do judges of the Nebraska Supreme Court reach the bench?

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

Nebraska Supreme Court / Joined 1943 / Served to 1961

Elwood B. Chappell

Justice, Nebraska Supreme Court

Elwood B. Chappell was a Justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1943. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1889–1968
Tenure: 1943–1961 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1943	Nebraska Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Chappell authored 182 published opinions for the court (1943–1960), plus 5 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Tail v. Olson (119 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. 187 of these were attributed to Chappell 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
1944	Tail v. Olson†	144 Neb. 820	119
1945	State ex rel. Nelson v. Butler†	145 Neb. 638	99
1949	Presbyterian Theological Seminary v. Harrington†	151 Neb. 81	93
1947	Archer v. Musick†	147 Neb. 1018	90
1948	Western Smelting & Refining Co. v. First National Bank†	150 Neb. 477	82
1948	Kipf v. Bitner†	150 Neb. 155	66
1948	Tuttle v. Wyman†	149 Neb. 769	63
1947	Rein v. Johnson†	149 Neb. 67	63
1944	Christensen v. Christensen†	144 Neb. 763	61
1945	May v. City of Kearney†	145 Neb. 475	56
1949	Frank v. State†	150 Neb. 745	55
1947	Placek v. Edstrom†	148 Neb. 79	53
1948	Johnson v. Griepenstroh†	150 Neb. 126	51
1944	Barney v. Platte Valley Public Power & Irrigation District· Dissent†	144 Neb. 230	48
1944	Baker v. Kirwin†	144 Neb. 797	47

Showing the 15 most-cited of 194 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 Nebraska Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Elwood B. Chappell on?: Elwood B. Chappell was a Justice of the Nebraska 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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18 years on the Nebraska Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).