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 1955 / Served to 1965

Henry K - changed from F Peterson

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Henry K - changed from F Peterson was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1955. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1884 · age 142
Tenure: 1955–1965 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1955	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Drake University

Judicial Record

In our data, Peterson authored 210 published opinions for the court (1955–1965), plus 11 dissents. Most cited: Acuff v. Schmit (98 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. 33 of these were attributed to Peterson 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
1956	Acuff v. Schmit· Dissent†	78 N.W.2d 480	98
1959	Henke v. Iowa Home Mutual Casualty Company	97 N.W.2d 168	65
1957	Strom v. Des Moines & Central Iowa Railway Co.· Dissent†	82 N.W.2d 781	37
1960	Long v. Gilchrist	105 N.W.2d 82	34
1957	Grant v. Norris	85 N.W.2d 261	34
1958	Holmes v. Gross	93 N.W.2d 714	31
1961	State v. Brightman	110 N.W.2d 315	30
1957	Wall v. County Board of Education of Johnson County	86 N.W.2d 231	30
1959	Erickson v. Erickson	94 N.W.2d 728	29
1963	State v. Green	121 N.W.2d 89	28
1956	Bruce Motor Freight, Inc. v. Lauterbach	77 N.W.2d 613	27
1962	State v. Drummer	117 N.W.2d 505	26
1961	Federated Mutual Implement & Hardware Insurance v. Erickson	110 N.W.2d 264	25
1957	Miller v. Palo Alto Board of Supervisors· Dissent†	84 N.W.2d 38	24
1956	State v. Sampson	79 N.W.2d 210	24

Showing the 15 most-cited of 221 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 Henry K - changed from F Peterson on?: Henry K - changed from F Peterson 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

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

10 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).