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

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

Iowa Supreme Court / Joined 1864 / Served to 1869

John Forrest Dillon

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

John Forrest Dillon was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1864. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1831–1914
Tenure: 1864–1869 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1864	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Iowa

M.D.

1850

Judicial Record

In our data, Dillon authored 290 published opinions for the court (1864–1869), plus 7 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: City of Clinton v. Cedar Rapids & Missouri River Railroad (94 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. 298 of these were attributed to Dillon 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
1868	City of Clinton v. Cedar Rapids & Missouri River Railroad†	24 Iowa 455	94
1864	Ayres v. Hartford Fire Insurance†	17 Iowa 176	79
1868	Bankhead v. Brown†	25 Iowa 540	54
1867	Behrens v. McKenzie†	23 Iowa 333	51
1866	Turner v. Hitchcock†	20 Iowa 310	50
1869	State v. McCormick†	27 Iowa 402	49
1864	Allen v. Armstrong†	16 Iowa 508	49
1868	Soper v. Henry County†	26 Iowa 264	47
1867	Cochran v. McCleary†	22 Iowa 75	45
1864	Ballinger v. Tarbell†	16 Iowa 491	40
1865	Kraut v. Crawford†	18 Iowa 549	36
1869	Cecil v. Beaver†	28 Iowa 241	35
1868	State v. Moore†	25 Iowa 128	34
1868	City of Pella v. Scholte†	24 Iowa 283	33
1864	White v. Polk County· Dissent†	17 Iowa 413	33

Showing the 15 most-cited of 298 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 Iowa Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was John Forrest Dillon on?: John Forrest Dillon was a Justice of the Iowa 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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5 years on the Iowa Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).