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 1857 / Served to 1865

James M. Hanna

Justice, Supreme Court of Indiana

James M. Hanna was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana (5 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1857. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1816–1872
Tenure: 1857–1865 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1857	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hanna authored 495 published opinions for the court (1857–1865), plus 4 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Joy v. State (59 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. 502 of these were attributed to Hanna 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
1860	Joy v. State†	14 Ind. 139	59
1859	Waldo v. Wallace†	12 Ind. 569	59
1860	Gulick v. New†	14 Ind. 93	45
1858	McJunkins v. State†	10 Ind. 140	42
1861	Wilson v. State†	16 Ind. 392	39
1863	Glascock v. Lyons†	20 Ind. 1	35
1859	Shattuck v. State†	11 Ind. 473	31
1859	Vancleave v. Milliken†	13 Ind. 105	30
1859	Shattuck v. Myers†	13 Ind. 46	30
1859	Meshmeier v. State· Dissent†	11 Ind. 482	30
1858	Swain v. Bussell†	10 Ind. 438	29
1858	Duffy v. Shockey†	11 Ind. 70	28
1858	Kerstetter v. Raymond†	10 Ind. 199	28
1858	Swift v. Ellsworth†	10 Ind. 205	27
1864	Pepper v. State ex rel. Harvey†	22 Ind. 399	26

Showing the 15 most-cited of 502 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 M. Hanna on?: James M. Hanna 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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7 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).