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 1959 / Served to 1974

Frank Biegelmeier

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

Frank Biegelmeier was a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1959. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1901–1988
Tenure: 1959–1974 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1959	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of South Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, Biegelmeier authored 189 published opinions for the court (1959–1978), plus 34 dissents and 45 concurrences. Most cited: Hoekstra v. Helgeland (82 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 Biegelmeier 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
1959	Hoekstra v. Helgeland	98 N.W.2d 669	82
1974	Kneip v. Herseth· Concurrence†	214 N.W.2d 93	78
1968	Hannahs v. Noah· Dissent†	158 N.W.2d 678	71
1972	Degen v. Bayman· Dissent†	200 N.W.2d 134	70
1961	Darnall v. State	108 N.W.2d 201	70
1967	Nugent v. Quam· Dissent†	152 N.W.2d 371	69
1965	State v. Zobel	134 N.W.2d 101	67
1963	Dunker v. Brown County Board of Education· Dissent†	121 N.W.2d 10	61
1966	State Highway Commission v. Hayes Estate· Dissent†	140 N.W.2d 680	59
1968	Clem v. City of Yankton· Concurrence†	160 N.W.2d 125	53
1966	Hurley v. State· Concurrence†	143 N.W.2d 722	52
1961	State v. Belt	111 N.W.2d 588	46
1968	Ventling v. Kraft· Concurrence†	161 N.W.2d 29	43
1972	State v. Kiehn	199 N.W.2d 594	42
1965	Burmeister v. Youngstrom· Concurrence†	139 N.W.2d 226	41

Showing the 15 most-cited of 268 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 Frank Biegelmeier on?: Frank Biegelmeier 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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15 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).