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

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

Supreme Court of Indiana / Joined 1865 / Served to 1871

James S. Frazer

Justice, Supreme Court of Indiana

James S. Frazer was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana (5 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1865. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1824–1893
Tenure: 1865–1871 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1865	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Frazer authored 267 published opinions for the court (1865–1871), plus 5 dissents. Most cited: Fletcher v. Holmes (118 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. 274 of these were attributed to Frazer 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
1865	Fletcher v. Holmes†	25 Ind. 458	118
1869	Evans v. Browne†	30 Ind. 514	72
1867	Smith v. State†	28 Ind. 321	50
1865	City of Indianapolis v. Grand Master†	25 Ind. 518	49
1865	Hynds v. Hays†	25 Ind. 31	45
1865	Brown v. Buzan†	24 Ind. 194	41
1865	Creek v. State†	24 Ind. 151	40
1865	Hingle v. State†	24 Ind. 28	37
1868	City of Indianapolis v. Huffer†	30 Ind. 235	34
1868	Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad v. Dunlap†	29 Ind. 426	34
1867	Muckenburg v. Holler†	29 Ind. 139	34
1865	Amidon v. Gaff†	24 Ind. 128	34
1868	Philbrooks v. McEwen†	29 Ind. 347	33
1866	Dumont v. Dufore†	27 Ind. 263	32
1865	Jenness v. Jenness†	24 Ind. 355	32

Showing the 15 most-cited of 274 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 Supreme Court of Indiana reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was James S. Frazer on?: James S. Frazer was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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5 years on the Supreme Court of Indiana. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).