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 1993 / Served to 2010

Marsha K. Ternus

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Marsha K. Ternus was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1993. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1951 · age 75
Tenure: 1993–2010 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1993	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Drake University

Judicial Record

In our data, Ternus authored 282 published opinions for the court (1993–2010), plus 11 dissents and 16 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Graves (406 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. 60 of these were attributed to Ternus 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
2003	State v. Graves	668 N.W.2d 860	406
2001	State v. Turner	630 N.W.2d 601	265
2006	State v. Newell	710 N.W.2d 6	231
2003	Harrington v. State	659 N.W.2d 509	227
2010	State v. Johnson	784 N.W.2d 192	225
1999	State v. Schminkey	597 N.W.2d 785	209
2004	State v. Taylor	689 N.W.2d 116	201
2001	State v. Rodriquez	636 N.W.2d 234	177
2009	State v. Dudley	766 N.W.2d 606	173
2004	Racing Ass'n of Central Iowa v. Fitzgerald	675 N.W.2d 1	165
2000	State v. Cline	617 N.W.2d 277	152
2002	Wright v. Brooke Group Ltd.	652 N.W.2d 159	143
2000	Graber v. City of Ankeny	616 N.W.2d 633	132
2000	Top of Iowa Cooperative v. Sime Farms, Inc.	608 N.W.2d 454	130
2007	State v. Lane· Dissent†	726 N.W.2d 371	114

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 Marsha K. Ternus on?: Marsha K. Ternus 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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17 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).