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 2018 / Active

Mark E. Salter

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

Mark E. Salter is a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, serving since 2018. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2018 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2018	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Salter authored 9 published opinions for the court (2018–2019). Most cited: Zochert v. Protective Life Ins. Co. (31 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. 9 of these were attributed to Salter 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
2018	Zochert v. Protective Life Ins. Co.†	2018 SD 84	31
2018	Hiller v. Hiller†	2018 SD 74	15
2019	Zhi Gang Zhang v. Rasmus†	932 N.W.2d 153	14
2019	State v. Roedder†	2019 SD 9	10
2019	Leighton v. Bennett†	2019 SD 19	8
2019	Bingham Farms Trust v. City of Belle Fourche†	932 N.W.2d 916	6
2019	In re Cleopatra Cameron Gift Trust†	931 N.W.2d 244	5
2019	State v. Short Bull†	928 N.W.2d 473	5
2019	State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co. v. Miranda†	932 N.W.2d 570	4

Showing the 9 most-cited of 9 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 is Mark E. Salter on?: Mark E. Salter is 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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8 years on the South Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-07-02. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).