How do judges of the Supreme Court of Indiana reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Indiana / Joined 1915 / Served to 1921

Moses B. Lairy

Justice, Supreme Court of Indiana

Moses B. Lairy was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana (5 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1915. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1859–1921
Tenure: 1915–1921 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1915	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Lairy authored 183 published opinions for the court (1915–1921), plus 6 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Batchelor v. State (112 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. 191 of these were attributed to Lairy 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
1920	Batchelor v. State†	189 Ind. 69	112
1919	Union Traction Co. v. Berry†	188 Ind. 514	95
1917	City of Decatur v. Eady†	186 Ind. 205	72
1917	House v. State†	186 Ind. 593	43
1916	Westphal v. Heckman†	185 Ind. 88	43
1919	Travis v. Rochester Bridge Co.†	188 Ind. 79	39
1916	City of Kokomo v. Loy†	185 Ind. 18	38
1915	Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railway Co. v. McCullom†	183 Ind. 556	38
1918	Prudential Insurance Co. of America v. Ritchey†	188 Ind. 157	37
1920	Bielich v. State†	189 Ind. 127	34
1918	Elsey v. Fidelity & Casualty Co.†	187 Ind. 447	34
1919	Sperry & Hutchinson Co. v. State†	188 Ind. 173	32
1917	Indianapolis Traction & Terminal Co. v. Hensley· Dissent†	186 Ind. 479	31
1918	State ex rel. Harkness v. Gleason†	187 Ind. 297	30
1917	Central Indiana Railway Co. v. Wishard†	186 Ind. 262	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 191 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 Supreme Court of Indiana reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Moses B. Lairy on?: Moses B. Lairy was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana.

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 Supreme Court of Indiana. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).