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 1951 / Served to 1965

G King Thompson

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

G King Thompson was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1951. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1877 · age 149
Tenure: 1951–1965 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1951	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Thompson authored 345 published opinions for the court (1951–1965), plus 29 dissents and 13 concurrences. Most cited: Best v. Yerkes (116 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. 68 of these were attributed to Thompson 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
1956	Best v. Yerkes	77 N.W.2d 23	116
1957	State v. Eichler	83 N.W.2d 576	106
1954	Hackman v. Beckwith	64 N.W.2d 275	89
1952	Kuiken v. Garrett	51 N.W.2d 149	87
1956	Stuart v. Pilgrim	74 N.W.2d 212	77
1954	State v. Jensen	66 N.W.2d 480	72
1958	Warren v. Iowa State Highway Commission	93 N.W.2d 60	68
1954	Turner v. Zip Motors, Inc.	65 N.W.2d 427	66
1962	Blackford v. Sioux City Dressed Pork, Inc.	118 N.W.2d 559	61
1956	Lynch v. Uhlenhopp	78 N.W.2d 491	60
1960	Ferris v. Riley	101 N.W.2d 176	59
1963	State v. Tornquist	120 N.W.2d 483	58
1957	Atherton v. Hoenig's Grocery	86 N.W.2d 252	54
1965	Danner v. Hass	134 N.W.2d 534	52
1961	Ruud v. Grimm· Concurrence†	110 N.W.2d 321	50

Showing the 15 most-cited of 388 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 G King Thompson on?: G King Thompson 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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14 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).