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

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

Utah Supreme Court / Joined 2003 / Former Justice

Jill Niederhauser Parrish

Justice, Utah Supreme Court

Jill Niederhauser Parrish was a Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2003. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2003 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Utah Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Weber State University
Yale University

Judicial Record

In our data, Parrish authored 216 published opinions for the court (2003–2015), plus 6 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Patterson v. Patterson (182 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. 98 of these were attributed to Parrish 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
2011	Patterson v. Patterson†	266 P.3d 828	182
2008	State v. Low†	192 P.3d 867	165
2006	State v. Winfield	2006 UT 4	123
2005	Anderson Development Co. v. Tobias	2005 UT 36	116
2011	J.M.W. v. T.I.Z.†	266 P.3d 702	105
2007	Martinez v. Media-Paymaster Plus/Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints	2007 UT 42	104
2012	Manzanares v. Byington· Dissent†	308 P.3d 382	100
2010	State v. Baker	2010 UT 18	92
2007	State v. Worwood	2007 UT 47	92
2006	State v. Lee	2006 UT 5	88
2008	Oman v. Davis School District	2008 UT 70	85
2009	State v. Robbins	2009 UT 23	84
2008	Ockey v. Lehmer	2008 UT 37	80
2004	State v. Green	2004 UT 76	77
2014	Honie v. State†	2014 UT 19	76

Showing the 15 most-cited of 224 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 Utah Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Jill Niederhauser Parrish on?: Jill Niederhauser Parrish was a Justice of the Utah 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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23 years on the Utah Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).