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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Minnesota Supreme Court / Joined 1970 / Served to 1980

Fallon Kelly

Justice, Minnesota Supreme Court

Fallon Kelly was a Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1970. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1907–1992
Tenure: 1970–1980 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1970	Minnesota Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Kelly authored 223 published opinions for the court (1970–1980), plus 41 dissents and 30 concurrences. Most cited: Betlach v. Wayzata Condominium (420 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. 96 of these were attributed to Kelly 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
1979	Betlach v. Wayzata Condominium	281 N.W.2d 328	420
1977	Durfee v. Rod Baxter Imports, Inc.	262 N.W.2d 349	139
1979	Cracraft v. City of St. Louis Park· Dissent†	279 N.W.2d 801	134
1976	Prideaux v. State Dept. of Public Safety	247 N.W.2d 385	131
1977	Cornfeldt v. Tongen	262 N.W.2d 684	117
1980	Brown v. State Automobile & Casualty Underwriters	293 N.W.2d 822	106
1977	Tolbert v. Gerber Industries, Inc.· Dissent†	255 N.W.2d 362	106
1976	Hardrives, Inc. v. City of LaCrosse, Wis.	240 N.W.2d 814	96
1980	Continental Can Co. Ex Rel. Wilson v. State	297 N.W.2d 241	92
1974	Myers v. Government Employees Insurance Co.· Concurrence†	225 N.W.2d 238	85
1977	State v. Dille	258 N.W.2d 565	83
1980	State v. Adams	295 N.W.2d 527	82
1979	Lanoue v. Fireman's Fund American Insurance Co.	278 N.W.2d 49	77
1973	State v. Hogan	212 N.W.2d 664	77
1978	State v. Lien	265 N.W.2d 833	75

Showing the 15 most-cited of 294 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 Minnesota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Fallon Kelly on?: Fallon Kelly was a Justice of the Minnesota 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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10 years on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).