How do judges of the South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

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

South Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1976 / Served to 1979

Lawrence J. Zastrow

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

Lawrence J. Zastrow was a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1976. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1917 · age 109
Tenure: 1976–1979 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1976	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of South Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, Zastrow authored 44 published opinions for the court (1976–1979), plus 17 dissents and 14 concurrences. Most cited: Guindon v. Guindon (107 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. 35 of these were attributed to Zastrow 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
1977	Guindon v. Guindon	256 N.W.2d 894	107
1978	Cunningham v. Yankton Clinic, P. A.	262 N.W.2d 508	92
1977	Schmidt v. Wildcat Cave, Inc.	261 N.W.2d 114	91
1977	State v. Heisinger	252 N.W.2d 899	66
1978	Clark v. Regent Insurance Co.	270 N.W.2d 26	55
1977	American Property Services, Inc. v. Barringer	256 N.W.2d 887	54
1978	State v. Kafka· Concurrence†	264 N.W.2d 702	51
1977	Peterson v. State· Concurrence†	261 N.W.2d 405	51
1977	State v. Hartman	256 N.W.2d 131	46
1977	City of Sioux Falls v. Henry Carlson Co.	258 N.W.2d 676	42
1978	Connelly v. Sherwood	268 N.W.2d 140	40
1976	People in Interest of LVA	248 N.W.2d 864	39
1978	State v. O'CONNOR· Concurrence†	265 N.W.2d 709	36
1978	State v. Dietz	264 N.W.2d 509	36
1978	State v. Hall	272 N.W.2d 308	33

Showing the 15 most-cited of 75 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 South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Lawrence J. Zastrow on?: Lawrence J. Zastrow was a Justice of the South Dakota 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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3 years on the South Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).