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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Michigan Supreme Court / Joined 1929 / Served to 1955

Henry M. Butzel

Justice, Michigan Supreme Court

Henry M. Butzel was a Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1929. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1871–1963
Tenure: 1929–1955 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1929	Michigan Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Butzel authored 1,237 published opinions for the court (1929–2008), plus 59 dissents and 29 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Davis (206 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. 41 of these were attributed to Butzel 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
1955	People v. Davis	72 N.W.2d 269	206
1955	People v. Guillett	69 N.W.2d 140	124
1938	Austin v. Older	278 N.W. 727	93
1930	People v. McMurchy	228 N.W. 723	80
1929	City of North Muskegon v. Miller	227 N.W. 743	70
1955	People v. Medcoff	73 N.W.2d 537	69
1951	State Highway Commissioner v. Detroit City Controller†	331 Mich. 337	64
1943	People v. Smallwood	10 N.W.2d 303	63
1940	People v. Hawthorne· Concurrence	291 N.W. 205	63
1948	Geib v. Slater	31 N.W.2d 65	62
1938	Meek v. Wilson	278 N.W. 731	62
1947	Leininger v. Secretary of State· Dissent	26 N.W.2d 348	61
1947	Herman v. Mobile Homes Corp.	26 N.W.2d 757	60
1939	Guardian Depositors Corp. v. Brown	287 N.W. 798	60
1930	People v. Lowell· Dissent	230 N.W. 202	60

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,339 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 Michigan Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Henry M. Butzel on?: Henry M. Butzel was a Justice of the Michigan 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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26 years on the Michigan Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).