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

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

Supreme Court of Indiana / Joined 1966 / Served to 1967

Frederick Eugene Rakestraw

Justice, Supreme Court of Indiana

Frederick Eugene Rakestraw was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana, who joined the court in 1966. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1923–2004
Tenure: 1966–1967 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1966	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Rakestraw authored 47 published opinions for the court (1966), plus 2 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Elder v. Fisher (169 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. 22 of these were attributed to Rakestraw 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
1966	Elder v. Fisher	217 N.E.2d 847	169
1966	INDIANAPOLIS HORSE PATROL, INC., a CORP. v. Ward	217 N.E.2d 626	60
1966	Stock v. State	219 N.E.2d 809	48
1966	Indianapolis Horse Patrol, Inc. v. Ward†	247 Ind. 519	42
1966	Layton v. State· Dissent†	221 N.E.2d 881	33
1966	Fisher v. State	219 N.E.2d 818	33
1966	Miles v. State	216 N.E.2d 847	33
1966	Hunsberger v. Wyman	216 N.E.2d 345	29
1966	State v. Clark	217 N.E.2d 588	27
1966	Minton v. State	214 N.E.2d 380	27
1966	DURRETT v. State	219 N.E.2d 814	24
1966	State ex rel. Gibson General Hospital v. Warrick Circuit Court†	247 Ind. 240	17
1966	Willoughby v. State	214 N.E.2d 169	12
1966	Speedway Realty Co. v. Grasshoff Realty Corp.	216 N.E.2d 845	9
1966	Cole v. State	215 N.E.2d 865	9

Showing the 15 most-cited of 50 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 Supreme Court of Indiana reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Frederick Eugene Rakestraw on?: Frederick Eugene Rakestraw was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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1 year on the Supreme Court of Indiana. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).