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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Idaho Supreme Court / Joined 1997 / Served to 2003

Jesse R. Walters

Justice, Idaho Supreme Court

Jesse R. Walters was a Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1997. He previously served on the Idaho Court of Appeals. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1938 · age 88
Tenure: 1997–2003 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Idaho Court of Appeals	–	–
1997	Idaho Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Idaho

Judicial Record

In our data, Walters authored 849 published opinions for the court (1979–2010), plus 10 dissents and 27 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Hernandez (2,575 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. 206 of these were attributed to Walters 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
1991	State v. Hernandez	822 P.2d 1011	2,575
1982	State v. Reinke	653 P.2d 1183	736
1992	Murray v. State	828 P.2d 1323	392
1990	Russell v. State	794 P.2d 654	216
1995	Hassett v. State	900 P.2d 221	209
1988	Larkin v. State	764 P.2d 439	147
1983	State v. Campbell	662 P.2d 1149	129
1999	State v. Hairston	988 P.2d 1170	105
1991	State v. Reynolds	816 P.2d 1002	105
2000	Baxter v. Craney	16 P.3d 263	87
1998	Castaneda v. Brighton Corp.	950 P.2d 1262	87
1989	Cole v. Kunzler	768 P.2d 815	87
1984	Hirst v. St. Paul Fire & Marine Insurance	683 P.2d 440	87
1989	Davis v. State	775 P.2d 1243	83
1998	State v. Cobb	969 P.2d 244	80

Showing the 15 most-cited of 889 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 Idaho Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Jesse R. Walters on?: Jesse R. Walters was a Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

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