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 1972 / Served to 1986

Mark McCormick

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Mark McCormick was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1972. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1933 · age 93
Tenure: 1972–1986 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1972	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Georgetown University

Judicial Record

In our data, McCormick authored 173 published opinions for the court (1972–1986), plus 73 dissents and 63 concurrences. Most cited: Lunday Ex Rel. Lunday v. Vogelmann (124 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. 177 of these were attributed to McCormick 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
1973	Lunday Ex Rel. Lunday v. Vogelmann	213 N.W.2d 904	124
1979	State v. O'CONNELL· Concurrence†	275 N.W.2d 197	118
1982	Goetzman v. Wichern	327 N.W.2d 742	117
1980	Rudolph v. Iowa Methodist Medical Center	293 N.W.2d 550	115
1974	Brainard v. State	222 N.W.2d 711	110
1981	Weitl v. Moes· Concurrence†	311 N.W.2d 259	106
1978	City of Davenport v. Public Employment Relations Board	264 N.W.2d 307	102
1980	State v. Hall· Concurrence†	297 N.W.2d 80	95
1979	Wilson v. Nepstad· Concurrence†	282 N.W.2d 664	94
1974	Keasling Ex Rel. Keasling v. Thompson· Dissent†	217 N.W.2d 687	89
1976	Iowa Civil Liberties Union v. Critelli	244 N.W.2d 564	83
1977	State v. Trudo· Dissent†	253 N.W.2d 101	80
1984	Madison v. Colby	348 N.W.2d 202	67
1974	State v. Johnson	224 N.W.2d 617	67
1977	City of Waterloo v. Selden	251 N.W.2d 506	65

Showing the 15 most-cited of 309 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 Mark McCormick on?: Mark McCormick 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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14 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).