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 1935 / Served to 1940

Paul W. Richards

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Paul W. Richards was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1935. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1935–1940 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1935	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Richards authored 197 published opinions for the court (1935–1940), plus 13 dissents. Most cited: Claussen v. Estate of Johnson (24 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. 2 of these were attributed to Richards 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
1938	Claussen v. Estate of Johnson	278 N.W. 297	24
1939	Jermaine v. Graf	283 N.W. 428	22
1940	Scott v. Hansen	289 N.W. 710	21
1938	Dean v. Iowa-Des Moines National Bank & Trust Co.· Dissent	281 N.W. 714	21
1940	Stice v. Consolidated Indiana Coal Co.· Dissent	291 N.W. 452	20
1940	McBride v. Stewart	290 N.W. 700	20
1936	State v. Siegel	264 N.W. 613	20
1938	Lenth v. Schug· Separate	281 N.W. 510	18
1937	Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance v. Murphy	271 N.W. 899	17
1939	Reynolds v. Aller	284 N.W. 825	16
1936	Park v. National Casualty Co.	270 N.W. 23	16
1935	Hunter Ex Rel. Hunter v. Irwin	263 N.W. 34	16
1938	McGarry v. Mathis	282 N.W. 786	15
1937	Mayer v. Sheetz	273 N.W. 138	15
1935	Wilson v. Oxborrow	264 N.W. 1	15

Showing the 15 most-cited of 211 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 Paul W. Richards on?: Paul W. Richards 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

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

5 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).