How do judges of the South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

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

South Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1994 / Former Justice

John K. Konenkamp

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

John K. Konenkamp was a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1994. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1944 · age 82
Tenure: 1994 · 32 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1994	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Konenkamp authored 490 published opinions for the court (1985–2015), plus 36 dissents and 67 concurrences. Most cited: Martinmaas v. Engelmann (166 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. 220 of these were attributed to Konenkamp 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
2000	Martinmaas v. Engelmann· Concurrence†	2000 SD 85	166
1996	Moss v. Guttormson	1996 SD 76	133
2001	State v. Guthrie	627 N.W.2d 401	123
2002	Chem-Age Industries, Inc. v. Glover	2002 SD 122	113
1998	Sopko v. C & R Transfer Co., Inc.	1998 SD 8	112
1998	State v. Pellegrino	1998 SD 39	101
1998	State v. Nelson	1998 SD 124	97
1999	State v. Wright	1999 SD 50	92
1999	Fuerstenberg v. Fuerstenberg	1999 SD 35	87
1998	State v. Bonner	1998 SD 30	87
1998	Kobbeman v. Oleson	1998 SD 20	84
2000	State v. Stanga	2000 SD 129	80
2001	State v. Dillon	2001 SD 97	78
2003	Arneson v. Arneson	2003 SD 125	74
1999	State v. Smith· Concurrence†	1999 SD 83	74

Showing the 15 most-cited of 593 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 South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was John K. Konenkamp on?: John K. Konenkamp was a Justice of the South Dakota 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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32 years on the South Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).