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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Michigan Supreme Court / Joined 1946 / Served to 1970

John Dethmers

Justice, Michigan Supreme Court

John Dethmers was a Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1946. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1903–1971
Tenure: 1946–1970 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1946	Michigan Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Hope College

Judicial Record

In our data, Dethmers authored 687 published opinions for the court (1946–1970), plus 50 dissents and 29 concurrences. Most cited: Sheppard v. Michigan National Bank (126 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. 160 of these were attributed to Dethmers 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
1957	Sheppard v. Michigan National Bank· Concurrence†	83 N.W.2d 614	126
1969	People v. Cole· Concurrence†	172 N.W.2d 354	121
1970	Daley v. LaCroix· Concurrence†	179 N.W.2d 390	113
1965	Myers v. Genesee County Auditor· Dissent†	133 N.W.2d 190	111
1959	People v. Hendershot	98 N.W.2d 568	99
1960	People v. Zeigler	100 N.W.2d 456	94
1963	Hansen-Snyder Co. v. General Motors Corp.	124 N.W.2d 286	90
1959	Park v. Employment Security Commission· Dissent†	94 N.W.2d 407	83
1965	Hill v. Harbor Steel & Supply Corp.· Concurrence†	132 N.W.2d 54	80
1961	Lince v. Monson	108 N.W.2d 845	77
1970	Fisher v. Johnson Milk Co., Inc.	174 N.W.2d 752	76
1964	Sherbutte v. City of Marine City· Dissent†	130 N.W.2d 920	75
1958	In Re Huff	91 N.W.2d 613	71
1970	People v. Lemmons	178 N.W.2d 496	70
1964	In Re Carey· Dissent†	126 N.W.2d 727	69

Showing the 15 most-cited of 769 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 Michigan Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was John Dethmers on?: John Dethmers was a Justice of the Michigan 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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24 years on the Michigan Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).