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 1978 / Served to 2013

Jerry L. Larson

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Jerry L. Larson was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1978. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1936 · age 90
Tenure: 1978–2013 · 35 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1978	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Larson authored 629 published opinions for the court (1978–2008), plus 38 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Heemstra (168 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. 127 of these were attributed to Larson 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
2006	State v. Heemstra	721 N.W.2d 549	168
2000	State v. Jacobs	607 N.W.2d 679	166
1997	Magnusson Agency v. Public Entity National Co.-Midwest	560 N.W.2d 20	119
2007	State v. Lane· Concurrence†	726 N.W.2d 371	114
1981	Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Co. v. Sandbulte	302 N.W.2d 104	108
2002	State v. Myers	653 N.W.2d 574	107
1995	State v. Loyd	530 N.W.2d 708	107
1981	Weitl v. Moes· Concurrence†	311 N.W.2d 259	106
2000	State v. Tangie	616 N.W.2d 564	103
1994	Lara v. Thomas	512 N.W.2d 777	101
1985	Northrup v. Farmland Industries, Inc.	372 N.W.2d 193	97
1980	State v. Hall	297 N.W.2d 80	95
1981	Thompson v. Bohlken	312 N.W.2d 501	93
2006	State v. Carey	709 N.W.2d 547	89
1996	Sun Valley Iowa Lake Ass'n v. Anderson	551 N.W.2d 621	88

Showing the 15 most-cited of 675 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 Jerry L. Larson on?: Jerry L. Larson 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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35 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).