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 1894 / Served to 1917

Horace E. Deemer

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Horace E. Deemer was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1894. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1894–1917 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1894	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Deemer authored 1,518 published opinions for the court (1894–1917), plus 48 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Brady (105 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. 1,574 of these were attributed to Deemer 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
1896	State v. Brady†	100 Iowa 191	105
1896	Goodwin v. Provident Savings Life Assurance Ass'n†	97 Iowa 226	86
1906	Graves v. Graves†	132 Iowa 199	76
1902	State ex rel. White v. Barker†	116 Iowa 96	76
1907	Ranck v. City of Cedar Rapids· Dissent†	134 Iowa 563	68
1903	State v. Vance†	119 Iowa 685	68
1895	Mentzer v. Western Union Telegraph Co.†	93 Iowa 752	67
1909	Bruggeman v. Illinois Central Railroad†	147 Iowa 187	64
1899	Keyes v. City of Cedar Falls†	107 Iowa 509	61
1908	Luedecke v. Des Moines Cabinet Co.†	140 Iowa 223	57
1906	State v. Smith· Dissent†	129 Iowa 709	56
1896	Kearney Milling & Elevator Co. v. Union Pacific Railway Co.· Dissent†	97 Iowa 719	56
1915	Weber v. Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad· Dissent†	175 Iowa 358	55
1908	McSurely v. McGrew†	140 Iowa 163	54
1897	Gould v. Schermer†	101 Iowa 582	53

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,582 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 Horace E. Deemer on?: Horace E. Deemer 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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22 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).