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 1946 / Served to 1965

Norman R. Hays

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Norman R. Hays was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1946. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1891–1966
Tenure: 1946–1965 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1946	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Grinnell College
Harvard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Hays authored 308 published opinions for the court (1946–1965), plus 25 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Acuff v. Schmit (98 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. 57 of these were attributed to Hays 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
1956	Acuff v. Schmit	78 N.W.2d 480	98
1947	Lindquist v. Des Moines Union Railway Co.	30 N.W.2d 120	67
1950	Haynes v. Presbyterian Hospital Ass'n	45 N.W.2d 151	62
1950	Helton v. Crawley· Dissent†	41 N.W.2d 60	56
1959	Chenoweth v. Flynn	99 N.W.2d 310	47
1962	Cogley Clinic v. Martini· Dissent†	112 N.W.2d 678	46
1954	Davis Ex Rel. Grant v. Davis· Dissent†	67 N.W.2d 566	44
1951	Doyle v. Kahl	46 N.W.2d 52	40
1960	Murray v. Lang	106 N.W.2d 643	39
1958	Jacobson v. Leap	88 N.W.2d 919	39
1953	Reuter v. Iowa Trust & Savings Bank	57 N.W.2d 225	39
1950	McGulpin v. Bessmer· Dissent†	43 N.W.2d 121	38
1949	Dunham v. Des Moines Railway Co.	35 N.W.2d 578	38
1957	Collins v. State Board of Social Welfare	81 N.W.2d 4	37
1961	Barton v. Nevada Poultry Company	110 N.W.2d 660	36

Showing the 15 most-cited of 339 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 Norman R. Hays on?: Norman R. Hays 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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18 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).