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 1933 / Served to 1938

Maurice F. Donegan

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Maurice F. Donegan was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1933. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1933–1938 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1933	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Donegan authored 210 published opinions for the court (1932–1938), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: White v. Center (38 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. 3 of these were attributed to Donegan 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
1934	White v. Center	254 N.W. 90	38
1935	Webster v. Luckow	258 N.W. 685	35
1936	Duncan v. City of Des Moines· Concurrence	268 N.W. 547	30
1937	State v. Ferguson	270 N.W. 874	27
1935	Dolan v. Bremner	263 N.W. 798	25
1934	Hahn v. Clayton County	255 N.W. 695	25
1937	Ontjes v. McNider	275 N.W. 328	22
1934	Lang v. Siddall	254 N.W. 783	22
1933	Brown v. Martin	248 N.W. 368	22
1937	Smith v. Middle States Utilities Co. of Delaware	275 N.W. 158	21
1935	Horrabin Paving Co. v. City of Creston	262 N.W. 480	21
1937	Porter v. Decker	270 N.W. 897	20
1937	Boone Biblical College v. Forrest	275 N.W. 132	19
1934	Fry v. Smith	253 N.W. 147	19
1933	Dille v. Plainview Coal Co.	250 N.W. 607	19

Showing the 15 most-cited of 211 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 Maurice F. Donegan on?: Maurice F. Donegan 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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5 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).