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

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

Nebraska Supreme Court / Joined 1965 / Served to 1983

Hale McCown

Justice, Nebraska Supreme Court

Hale McCown was a Justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1965. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1914–2005
Tenure: 1965–1983 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1965	Nebraska Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Hastings College
Duke University

Judicial Record

In our data, McCown authored 291 published opinions for the court (1965–1983), plus 123 dissents and 46 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Alvarez (186 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. 438 of these were attributed to McCown 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
1972	State v. Alvarez· Dissent†	202 N.W.2d 604	186
1977	Prendergast v. Nelson· Dissent†	256 N.W.2d 657	136
1973	Hawkins Construction Co. v. Matthews Co., Inc.· Concurrence†	209 N.W.2d 643	109
1977	Davco Realty Co. v. Picnic Foods, Inc.· Concurrence†	252 N.W.2d 142	103
1979	State v. Williams†	287 N.W.2d 18	101
1980	Kentopp v. Kentopp†	295 N.W.2d 275	93
1969	Krause v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance· Dissent†	169 N.W.2d 601	90
1968	Brown v. City of Omaha†	160 N.W.2d 805	89
1981	State v. Palmer†	313 N.W.2d 648	73
1977	State v. Benson· Dissent†	251 N.W.2d 659	68
1976	State v. McDonald†	240 N.W.2d 8	67
1983	Omaha Country Club v. City of Omaha· Dissent†	332 N.W.2d 206	59
1981	Kullbom v. Kullbom· Concurrence†	306 N.W.2d 844	57
1979	Simants v. State†	277 N.W.2d 217	57
1983	National Crane Corp. v. Ohio Steel Tube Co.†	332 N.W.2d 39	55

Showing the 15 most-cited of 460 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 Nebraska Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Hale McCown on?: Hale McCown was a Justice of the Nebraska 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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18 years on the Nebraska Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).