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 1984 / Served to 1994

George W. Wuest

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

George W. Wuest was a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1984. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1924 · age 102
Tenure: 1984–1994 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1984	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of South Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, Wuest authored 314 published opinions for the court (1966–1995), plus 62 dissents and 129 concurrences. Most cited: Malcolm v. Malcolm (197 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. 216 of these were attributed to Wuest 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
1985	Malcolm v. Malcolm· Concurrence†	365 N.W.2d 863	197
1987	Groseth International, Inc. v. Tenneco, Inc.· Concurrence†	410 N.W.2d 159	156
1981	Herndon v. Herndon	305 N.W.2d 917	129
1989	Pickering v. Pickering	434 N.W.2d 758	119
1985	State v. Logue	372 N.W.2d 151	119
1993	Nelson v. WEB Water Development Ass'n, Inc.	507 N.W.2d 691	95
1986	State v. Rufener· Concurrence†	392 N.W.2d 424	93
1992	State v. Floody	481 N.W.2d 242	87
1985	Sabag v. Continental South Dakota· Concurrence†	374 N.W.2d 349	82
1988	Sharp v. Sharp	422 N.W.2d 443	81
1991	State v. Basker	468 N.W.2d 413	74
1992	Ducheneaux v. Miller	488 N.W.2d 902	73
1993	Lamp v. First National Bank of Garretson· Concurrence†	496 N.W.2d 581	72
1986	State v. Andrews	393 N.W.2d 76	71
1988	State v. Champagne	422 N.W.2d 840	70

Showing the 15 most-cited of 505 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 George W. Wuest on?: George W. Wuest 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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10 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).