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

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

Utah Supreme Court / Joined 1995 / Served to 2003

Leonard H. Russon

Justice, Utah Supreme Court

Leonard H. Russon was a Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1995. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1933 · age 93
Tenure: 1995–2003 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	Utah Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Careers Unlimited

Judicial Record

In our data, Russon authored 187 published opinions for the court (1985–2003), plus 21 dissents and 20 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Holgate (405 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. 61 of these were attributed to Russon 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
2000	State v. Holgate	2000 UT 74	405
1998	State v. Thomas	961 P.2d 299	196
2002	Bailey v. Bayles	2002 UT 58	191
2002	WebBank v. American General Annuity Service Corp.	2002 UT 88	142
2001	Bair v. Axiom Design, L.L.C.	2001 UT 20	125
2000	MacRis & Associates, Inc. v. Neways, Inc.	2000 UT 93	102
2001	SME Industries, Inc. v. Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates, Inc.	2001 UT 54	98
2002	Prince v. Bear River Mutual Insurance Co.	2002 UT 68	96
2001	Hall v. Utah State Department of Corrections	2001 UT 34	94
1994	Salt Lake City v. Ohms	881 P.2d 844	87
1995	Ward v. Intermountain Farmers Ass'n· Concurrence†	907 P.2d 264	85
2000	Brown v. Glover	2000 UT 89	80
1997	State v. Brown	948 P.2d 337	79
2002	State v. Fedorowicz	2002 UT 67	78
1995	State v. Mohi· Concurrence†	901 P.2d 991	76

Showing the 15 most-cited of 228 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 Utah Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Leonard H. Russon on?: Leonard H. Russon was a Justice of the Utah Supreme Court.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

8 years on the Utah Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).