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

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

Wyoming Supreme Court / Joined 1974 / Served to 1983

John F. Raper

Justice, Wyoming Supreme Court

John F. Raper was a Justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1913–1993
Tenure: 1974–1983 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1974	Wyoming Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Drake University

Judicial Record

In our data, Raper authored 259 published opinions for the court (1975–1983), plus 25 dissents and 29 concurrences. Most cited: Washakie County School District Number One v. Herschler (263 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. 304 of these were attributed to Raper 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
1980	Washakie County School District Number One v. Herschler†	606 P.2d 310	263
1981	Hopkinson v. State†	632 P.2d 79	259
1980	McGuire v. McGuire†	608 P.2d 1278	144
1981	ABC Builders, Inc. v. Phillips†	632 P.2d 925	129
1979	Moxley v. Laramie Builders, Inc.†	600 P.2d 733	124
1979	Scherling v. Kilgore†	599 P.2d 1352	113
1979	Duke v. Housen†	589 P.2d 334	106
1976	Allen v. Allen†	550 P.2d 1137	105
1983	Hopkinson v. State†	664 P.2d 43	104
1978	Nehring v. Russell†	582 P.2d 67	104
1976	Richmond v. State†	554 P.2d 1217	100
1981	Parkhurst v. State†	628 P.2d 1369	98
1982	Thomson v. Wyoming In-Stream Flow Committee†	651 P.2d 778	96
1975	Hicklin v. State†	535 P.2d 743	93
1977	Cullin v. State†	565 P.2d 445	91

Showing the 15 most-cited of 313 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 Wyoming Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was John F. Raper on?: John F. Raper was a Justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

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