How do judges of the South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

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

South Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1931 / Served to 1957

Herbert B. Rudolph

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

Herbert B. Rudolph was a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1931. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1896–1957
Tenure: 1931–1957 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1931	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of South Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, Rudolph authored 445 published opinions for the court (1931–1957), plus 29 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: Melby v. Anderson (66 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. 53 of these were attributed to Rudolph 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
1936	Melby v. Anderson	266 N.W. 135	66
1943	Northwestern Engineering Co. v. Ellerman	10 N.W.2d 879	39
1946	Danforth v. City of Yankton· Dissent	25 N.W.2d 50	38
1951	Flanagan v. Slattery· Dissent†	74 S.D. 92	35
1955	Application of Habeck· Dissent†	69 N.W.2d 353	33
1936	State v. Wolfe· Dissent	266 N.W. 116	33
1933	Kansas City Bridge Co. v. State	250 N.W. 343	30
1946	State Ex Rel. Henning v. Jameson· Concurrence	22 N.W.2d 731	29
1932	Biggins v. Wagner	245 N.W. 385	29
1937	Zeigler v. Ryan	271 N.W. 767	28
1954	Busby v. Shafer· Dissent†	66 N.W.2d 910	25
1952	Mehlum v. Nunda Cooperative Ass'n· Concurrence†	56 N.W.2d 282	25
1956	Kindley v. Williams	76 N.W.2d 227	24
1938	Security State Bank v. Breen	277 N.W. 497	24
1936	Holmstrom v. Wall	268 N.W. 423	24

Showing the 15 most-cited of 489 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 South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Herbert B. Rudolph on?: Herbert B. Rudolph was a Justice of the South 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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26 years on the South Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).