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 2000 / Served to 2010

Michael Jon Wilkins

Justice, Utah Supreme Court

Michael Jon Wilkins was a Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2000. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1948 · age 78
Tenure: 2000–2010 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	Utah Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Utah
University of Utah

Judicial Record

In our data, Wilkins authored 181 published opinions for the court (2000–2010), plus 18 dissents and 19 concurrences. Most cited: Orvis v. Johnson (253 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. 65 of these were attributed to Wilkins 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
2008	Orvis v. Johnson	2008 UT 2	253
2000	Bradbury v. Valencia	2000 UT 50	159
2006	Menzies v. Galetka· Concurrence†	2006 UT 81	122
2002	State v. Daniels†	40 P.3d 611	99
2002	Brookside Mobile Home Park, Ltd. v. Peebles	2002 UT 48	94
2002	Central Florida Investments, Inc. v. Parkwest Associates†	40 P.3d 599	94
2007	State v. Tiedemann· Dissent†	2007 UT 49	93
2007	State v. Worwood· Dissent†	2007 UT 47	92
2002	R.T. Nielson Co. v. Cook†	40 P.3d 1119	91
2000	State v. Kohl	2000 UT 35	88
2002	Waddoups v. Amalgamated Sugar Co.	2002 UT 69	84
2003	Miller v. Weaver	2003 UT 12	82
2004	Judd v. Drezga	2004 UT 91	77
2003	Grynberg v. Questar Pipeline Co.	2003 UT 8	71
2000	State v. Nelson-Waggoner	2000 UT 59	69

Showing the 15 most-cited of 218 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 Michael Jon Wilkins on?: Michael Jon Wilkins 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

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10 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).