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 1868 / Served to 1891

Joseph M. Beck

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Joseph M. Beck was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court (7 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1868. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1868–1891 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1868	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Beck authored 1,884 published opinions for the court (1868–1891), plus 88 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Smith & Co. v. McLean (105 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. 1,999 of these were attributed to Beck 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	Smith & Co. v. McLean†	24 Iowa 322	105
1883	Koehler & Lange v. Hill· Dissent†	60 Iowa 543	87
1868	Tisdale v. Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance†	26 Iowa 170	87
1870	Stewart v. Bd. of Super. of Polk County· Dissent	30 Iowa 9	82
1877	Powers v. City of Council Bluffs· Separate†	45 Iowa 652	75
1871	Grube v. Wells†	34 Iowa 148	74
1877	Schroeder v. C. R. I. & P. R.†	47 Iowa 375	71
1883	Tiedt v. Carstensen†	61 Iowa 334	62
1890	Vannest v. Fleming†	79 Iowa 638	57
1887	State v. Calhoun†	72 Iowa 432	57
1875	State v. Brandt· Dissent†	41 Iowa 593	55
1870	Warren v. Henly†	31 Iowa 31	54
1868	Bankhead v. Brown· Dissent†	25 Iowa 540	54
1876	Eadie, Guilford & Co. v. Ashbaugh· Dissent†	44 Iowa 519	53
1874	City of Dubuque v. Illinois Central Railroad†	39 Iowa 56	53

Showing the 15 most-cited of 2,005 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 Joseph M. Beck on?: Joseph M. Beck 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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23 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).