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 1984 / Served to 2000

Michael D. Zimmerman

Justice, Utah Supreme Court

Michael D. Zimmerman was a Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1984. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1943 · age 83
Tenure: 1984–2000 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1984	Utah Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Utah
University of Utah

Judicial Record

In our data, Zimmerman authored 381 published opinions for the court (1984–2000), plus 36 dissents and 142 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Pena (508 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. 223 of these were attributed to Zimmerman 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
1994	State v. Pena	869 P.2d 932	508
1993	State v. Dunn	850 P.2d 1201	447
1994	State v. Menzies	889 P.2d 393	259
1993	State v. Thurman	846 P.2d 1256	251
1988	State v. Bishop· Concurrence†	753 P.2d 439	250
1985	Beck v. Farmers Insurance Exchange	701 P.2d 795	246
1988	State v. Lafferty	749 P.2d 1239	244
1987	State v. Knight	734 P.2d 913	236
1998	Valcarce v. Fitzgerald	961 P.2d 305	234
1991	State v. Ramirez	817 P.2d 774	231
1987	State v. Tillman· Concurrence†	750 P.2d 546	213
1989	State v. Verde	770 P.2d 116	205
1992	State v. Hamilton	827 P.2d 232	203
1989	State v. Rimmasch	775 P.2d 388	202
1985	Scharf v. BMG Corp.	700 P.2d 1068	195

Showing the 15 most-cited of 559 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 D. Zimmerman on?: Michael D. Zimmerman 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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16 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).