How do judges of the North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

North Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1979 / Former Justice

Gerald W. VandeWalle

Justice, North Dakota Supreme Court

Gerald W. VandeWalle was a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1933 · age 93
Tenure: 1979 · 47 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	North Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of North Dakota
University of North Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, VandeWalle authored 339 published opinions for the court (1978–2023), plus 4 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: Heckelsmiller v. State (72 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. 94 of these were attributed to VandeWalle 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
2004	Heckelsmiller v. State	2004 ND 191	72
2004	Garcia v. State	2004 ND 81	64
2006	Bertsch v. Bertsch	2006 ND 31	52
2005	State v. Noorlun	2005 ND 189	50
2009	Eberle v. Eberle	2009 ND 107	39
2008	Wold v. Wold	2008 ND 14	38
2005	Brandner v. Brandner	2005 ND 111	36
2009	Shull v. Walcker	2009 ND 142	35
2004	Green v. Mid Dakota Clinic	2004 ND 12	35
2008	Langer v. Bartholomay	2008 ND 40	33
2005	State v. Parisien	2005 ND 152	31
2005	Lochthowe v. C.F. Peterson Estate	2005 ND 40	29
2004	St. Claire v. St. Claire	2004 ND 39	29
2009	Grand Forks County Social Services v. T.L.	2009 ND 43	28
2005	State v. Krull	2005 ND 63	28

Showing the 15 most-cited of 358 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 North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Gerald W. VandeWalle on?: Gerald W. VandeWalle was a Justice of the North 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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47 years on the North Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).