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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Idaho Court of Appeals / Joined 2009 / Served to 2011

John M. Melanson

Judge, Idaho Court of Appeals

John M. Melanson was a Judge of the Idaho Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 2009. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2009–2011 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2009	Idaho Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

Idaho State University

Judicial Record

In our data, Melanson authored 46 published opinions for the court (2009–2012), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: Wolf v. State (306 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. 2 of these were attributed to Melanson 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
2011	Wolf v. State	266 P.3d 1169	306
2011	Gonzales v. State	254 P.3d 69	180
2011	State v. Smith	266 P.3d 1220	53
2010	Mendiola v. State	247 P.3d 210	25
2010	State v. Petersen	241 P.3d 981	23
2011	State v. Betancourt	262 P.3d 278	20
2011	State v. PENTICO	265 P.3d 519	18
2011	Idaho Department of Health & Welfare v. Doe	261 P.3d 882	15
2012	State v. Lippert	276 P.3d 756	12
2012	Idaho Department of Health & Welfare v. Doe	275 P.3d 23	12
2012	Rossignol v. State	274 P.3d 1	12
2011	State v. Linenberger	263 P.3d 145	12
2011	State v. Pullin· Concurrence†	266 P.3d 1187	12
2011	State v. Johnson	266 P.3d 1161	12
2012	State v. Randle	276 P.3d 732	11

Showing the 15 most-cited of 47 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 Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was John M. Melanson on?: John M. Melanson was a Judge of the Idaho Court of Appeals.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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2 years on the Idaho Court of Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).