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 1939 / Served to 1950

Oscar Hale

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Oscar Hale was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1939. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1867–1950
Tenure: 1939–1950 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1939	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hale authored 259 published opinions for the court (1938–1950), plus 8 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Case v. Olson (39 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. 7 of these were attributed to Hale 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
1944	Case v. Olson	14 N.W.2d 717	39
1949	Lewis v. Minnesota Mutual Life Insurance	37 N.W.2d 316	37
1939	Blessing v. Welding	286 N.W. 436	37
1948	In Re Guardianship of Wiley· Dissent	34 N.W.2d 593	34
1945	State v. Knox· Dissent	18 N.W.2d 716	34
1945	In Re Estate of Cocklin· Dissent	17 N.W.2d 129	34
1950	Morrison-Knudsen Co. v. State Tax Commission· Dissent†	44 N.W.2d 449	31
1947	State v. Williams	28 N.W.2d 514	29
1942	In Re Estate of Winkler	5 N.W.2d 153	29
1942	State v. Cowen	3 N.W.2d 176	29
1942	Bump v. District Court of Polk County	5 N.W.2d 914	28
1939	McCornack v. Pickerell	283 N.W. 899	28
1947	Herr v. Lazor	28 N.W.2d 11	27
1946	State v. Critelli	24 N.W.2d 113	27
1947	In Re Estate of Ankeny	28 N.W.2d 414	26

Showing the 15 most-cited of 269 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 Oscar Hale on?: Oscar Hale 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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11 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).