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 1985 / Served to 1998

Herbert L. Meschke

Justice, North Dakota Supreme Court

Herbert L. Meschke was a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1928 · age 98
Tenure: 1985–1998 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	North Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Meschke authored 605 published opinions for the court (1985–1998), plus 71 dissents and 109 concurrences. Most cited: County of Stutsman v. State Historical Society of North Dakota (178 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. 226 of these were attributed to Meschke 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
1985	County of Stutsman v. State Historical Society of North Dakota	371 N.W.2d 321	178
1998	State v. Olander	1998 ND 50	137
1991	Soentgen v. Quain & Ramstad Clinic, P.C.	467 N.W.2d 73	95
1987	Kuntz v. State Highway Commissioner	405 N.W.2d 285	83
1988	Olson v. Fraase· Concurrence†	421 N.W.2d 820	77
1988	Bellemare v. Gateway Builders, Inc.· Concurrence†	420 N.W.2d 733	76
1986	Healy v. Healy	397 N.W.2d 71	74
1994	State v. Miller· Dissent†	510 N.W.2d 638	73
1989	Olson v. Olson	445 N.W.2d 1	73
1993	State v. Steffes· Concurrence†	500 N.W.2d 608	72
1988	State v. Schwalk· Concurrence†	430 N.W.2d 317	69
1992	State v. Langseth	492 N.W.2d 298	68
1986	Wall v. Lewis	393 N.W.2d 758	67
1994	Wiege v. Wiege	518 N.W.2d 708	65
1998	State v. Kitchen· Dissent†	1997 ND 241	64

Showing the 15 most-cited of 785 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 Herbert L. Meschke on?: Herbert L. Meschke 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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13 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).