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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Minnesota Supreme Court / Joined 1973 / Served to 1993

Lawrence R. Yetka

Justice, Minnesota Supreme Court

Lawrence R. Yetka was a Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1973. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1924 · age 102
Tenure: 1973–1993 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1973	Minnesota Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Yetka authored 496 published opinions for the court (1973–1992), plus 181 dissents and 62 concurrences. Most cited: State Ex Rel. Cooper v. French (632 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. 303 of these were attributed to Yetka 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
1990	State Ex Rel. Cooper v. French	460 N.W.2d 2	632
1988	Offerdahl v. University of Minnesota Hospitals & Clinics· Concurrence†	426 N.W.2d 425	379
1985	Hibbing Education Ass'n v. Public Employment Relations Board· Dissent†	369 N.W.2d 527	346
1977	Reserve Mining Co. v. Herbst· Concurrence†	256 N.W.2d 808	328
1978	State v. Merrill	274 N.W.2d 99	321
1986	Moylan v. Moylan· Concurrence†	384 N.W.2d 859	229
1979	Cherne Industrial, Inc. v. Grounds & Associates, Inc.	278 N.W.2d 81	201
1986	Sigurdson v. Isanti County· Concurrence†	386 N.W.2d 715	187
1991	Friedman v. Commissioner of Public Safety	473 N.W.2d 828	177
1979	Turner v. Alpha Phi Sorority House	276 N.W.2d 63	173
1980	State v. Austin	295 N.W.2d 246	156
1990	Sorenson v. St. Paul Ramsey Medical Center	457 N.W.2d 188	148
1991	State v. Russell· Concurrence†	477 N.W.2d 886	143
1979	Columbia Heights Motors, Inc. v. Allstate Insurance Co.	275 N.W.2d 32	138
1979	Cracraft v. City of St. Louis Park· Dissent†	279 N.W.2d 801	134

Showing the 15 most-cited of 739 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 Minnesota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Lawrence R. Yetka on?: Lawrence R. Yetka was a Justice of the Minnesota 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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20 years on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).