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 1970 / Served to 1986

Harvey Uhlenhopp

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Harvey Uhlenhopp was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1970. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1915 · age 111
Tenure: 1970–1986 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1970	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Grinnell College

Judicial Record

In our data, Uhlenhopp authored 417 published opinions for the court (1970–1986), plus 76 dissents and 55 concurrences. Most cited: In Re the Marriage of Vrban (240 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. 192 of these were attributed to Uhlenhopp 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
1984	In Re the Marriage of Vrban	359 N.W.2d 420	240
1984	Harsha v. State Savings Bank	346 N.W.2d 791	150
1972	In Re the Marriage of Williams· Concurrence†	199 N.W.2d 339	141
1979	State v. Hildebrand· Concurrence†	280 N.W.2d 393	129
1981	State v. Aldape	307 N.W.2d 32	108
1981	Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Co. v. Sandbulte· Concurrence†	302 N.W.2d 104	108
1974	Schnebly Ex Rel. Schnebly v. Baker	217 N.W.2d 708	97
1981	Snethen v. State	308 N.W.2d 11	96
1984	Sandbulte v. Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Co.	343 N.W.2d 457	95
1986	Saadiq v. State	387 N.W.2d 315	94
1983	In Re the Marriage of Vetternack	334 N.W.2d 761	94
1982	State v. Johnson	318 N.W.2d 417	91
1973	Kersten Co., Inc. v. Department of Social Services· Dissent†	207 N.W.2d 117	91
1984	State v. Bass	349 N.W.2d 498	90
1974	Daboll v. Hoden· Dissent†	222 N.W.2d 727	89

Showing the 15 most-cited of 548 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 Harvey Uhlenhopp on?: Harvey Uhlenhopp 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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16 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).