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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Minnesota Supreme Court / Joined 1998 / Served to 2004

James H. Gilbert

Justice, Minnesota Supreme Court

James H. Gilbert was a Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1998. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1947 · age 79
Tenure: 1998–2004 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1998	Minnesota Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Gilbert authored 110 published opinions for the court (1998–2004), plus 49 dissents and 40 concurrences. Most cited: Bernhardt v. State (280 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. 104 of these were attributed to Gilbert 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
2004	Bernhardt v. State· Concurrence†	684 N.W.2d 465	280
2000	Hoang Minh Ly v. Nystrom· Concurrence†	615 N.W.2d 302	167
2000	Martens v. Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co.· Dissent†	616 N.W.2d 732	164
1999	Fletcher v. St. Paul Pioneer Press	589 N.W.2d 96	135
2004	Opsahl v. State· Concurrence†	677 N.W.2d 414	130
2001	State v. Kuhnau	622 N.W.2d 552	128
1999	State v. Munson	594 N.W.2d 128	127
2001	American Tower, L.P. v. City of Grant	636 N.W.2d 309	122
1998	State v. Worthy	583 N.W.2d 270	109
2004	State v. McCoy	682 N.W.2d 153	98
1999	State v. Bauer	598 N.W.2d 352	92
2000	Interstate Power Co. v. Nobles County Board of Commissioners· Concurrence†	617 N.W.2d 566	91
2000	State v. Britton· Dissent†	604 N.W.2d 84	90
2003	Alpha Real Estate Co. of Rochester v. Delta Dental Plan of Minnesota	664 N.W.2d 303	82
1999	State v. Chambers	589 N.W.2d 466	82

Showing the 15 most-cited of 199 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 Minnesota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was James H. Gilbert on?: James H. Gilbert was a Justice of the Minnesota 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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6 years on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).