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 1889 / Served to 1901

Josiah Given

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Josiah Given was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1889. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1889–1901 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1889	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Given authored 774 published opinions for the court (1889–1901), plus 8 dissents. Most cited: Griswold v. Illinois Central Railway Co. (51 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. 786 of these were attributed to Given 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
1894	Griswold v. Illinois Central Railway Co.†	90 Iowa 265	51
1898	State v. Carnagy· Dissent†	106 Iowa 483	50
1890	Hagan v. Merchants & Bankers' Insurance†	81 Iowa 321	41
1897	Moore v. Chicago, St. Paul & Kansas City Railway Co.†	102 Iowa 595	39
1896	Hoitt v. Skinner†	99 Iowa 360	35
1893	State ex rel. Perine v. Van Beek†	87 Iowa 569	35
1898	Cascaden v. City of Waterloo†	106 Iowa 673	32
1898	Alpha Checkrower Co. v. David Bradley & Co.†	105 Iowa 537	32
1893	Shipley v. Reasoner†	87 Iowa 555	32
1890	Linden v. Green†	81 Iowa 365	32
1891	State v. Wise†	83 Iowa 596	30
1894	Smith v. Crawford County State Bank· Separate†	99 Iowa 282	29
1892	Fort Dodge Building & Loan Ass'n v. Scott†	86 Iowa 431	29
1891	State v. Beasley†	84 Iowa 83	28
1889	Esch Bros. v. Home Insurance†	78 Iowa 334	28

Showing the 15 most-cited of 788 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 Josiah Given on?: Josiah Given 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).