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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Idaho Supreme Court / Joined 2007 / Former Justice

Joel Horton

Justice, Idaho Supreme Court

Joel Horton was a Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2007. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1959 · age 67
Tenure: 2007 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2007	Idaho Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Idaho

Judicial Record

In our data, Horton authored 297 published opinions for the court (2007–2019), plus 11 dissents and 32 concurrences. Most cited: Rhoades v. State (450 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. 225 of these were attributed to Horton 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
2009	Rhoades v. State	220 P.3d 1066	450
2010	Ridgley v. State	227 P.3d 925	398
2014	Re: Thermination of Parental Rights (mother)†	156 Idaho 103	273
2009	Doe v. Department of Health & Welfare†	146 Idaho 759	242
2009	State v. Korn	224 P.3d 480	219
2013	State v. Timothy Alan Dunlap†	155 Idaho 345	191
2008	Losser v. Bradstreet	183 P.3d 758	187
2012	F. Kim Bailey v. Kerry Bailey†	153 Idaho 526	163
2017	State v. Victor Garcia-Rodriguez†	162 Idaho 271	161
2012	State v. Adamcik· Concurrence†	272 P.3d 417	161
2009	In Re Doe	203 P.3d 689	152
2009	State v. Grist	205 P.3d 1185	149
2009	State v. Clements· Concurrence†	218 P.3d 1143	137
2008	State v. Stevens· Concurrence†	191 P.3d 217	133
2008	Chavez v. Barrus	192 P.3d 1036	107

Showing the 15 most-cited of 340 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 Joel Horton on?: Joel Horton 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

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19 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).