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

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

Colorado Supreme Court / Joined 1919 / Served to 1929

John H. Denison

Justice, Colorado Supreme Court

John H. Denison was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1919. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1855–1935
Tenure: 1919–1929 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1919	Colorado Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Denison authored 596 published opinions for the court (1919–1928), plus 15 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: Industrial Commission v. Bonfils (378 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. 312 of these were attributed to Denison 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
1925	Industrial Commission v. Bonfils	241 P. 735	378
1923	Shields v. City of Loveland†	74 Colo. 27	68
1919	City & County of Denver v. Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Co.· Concurrence†	67 Colo. 225	52
1927	Aetna Life Insurance v. Industrial Commission	254 P. 995	45
1928	Searle v. Town Haxtun	271 P. 629	44
1927	People Ex Rel. Vollmar v. Stanley	255 P. 610	43
1920	Prouse v. Industrial Commission†	69 Colo. 382	42
1927	Arps v. City & County of Denver· Concurrence†	257 P. 1094	38
1925	Saint Mary's Academy of the Sisters of Loretto v. Solomon	238 P. 22	37
1923	People ex rel. Arkansas Valley Sugar Beet & Irrigated Land Co. v. Burke· Concurrence†	72 Colo. 486	37
1928	City of Denver v. Bossie	266 P. 214	32
1928	Bolles v. Kinton	263 P. 26	32
1922	Baker v. Denver Tramway Co.· Concurrence†	72 Colo. 233	32
1925	Rifle Potato Growers Co-Operative Ass'n v. Smith	240 P. 937	29
1923	Barker v. Mintz†	73 Colo. 262	27

Showing the 15 most-cited of 619 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 Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was John H. Denison on?: John H. Denison was a Justice of the Colorado 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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10 years on the Colorado Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).