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 1900 / Served to 1912

John C. Sherwin

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

John C. Sherwin was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1900. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1900–1912 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1900	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Sherwin authored 764 published opinions for the court (1900–1912), plus 5 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: Shaw v. City Council (53 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. 776 of these were attributed to Sherwin 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
1905	Shaw v. City Council†	131 Iowa 128	53
1902	Watson v. Dilts†	116 Iowa 249	48
1904	Estate of Kuhn v. Kuhn†	125 Iowa 449	41
1903	Kirsher v. Kirsher†	120 Iowa 337	36
1909	State v. Duff†	144 Iowa 142	35
1908	Gates v. Cole†	137 Iowa 613	35
1910	State v. O'Neil· Concurrence†	147 Iowa 513	34
1908	Collins v. Gleason Coal Co.†	140 Iowa 114	34
1902	Willfong v. Omaha & St. Louis Railroad†	116 Iowa 548	31
1908	Smith v. State Board of Medical Examiners†	140 Iowa 66	30
1906	Hardwick v. Hardwick· Concurrence†	130 Iowa 230	30
1905	Binder v. National Masonic Accident Ass'n†	127 Iowa 25	30
1904	State v. Worthen†	124 Iowa 408	30
1902	Epperly v. Ferguson†	118 Iowa 47	30
1907	Atlas Assurance Co. v. Atlas Insurance†	138 Iowa 228	29

Showing the 15 most-cited of 777 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 C. Sherwin on?: John C. Sherwin 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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12 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).