How do judges of the North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

North Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1963 / Served to 1992

Ralph John Erickstad

Justice, North Dakota Supreme Court

Ralph John Erickstad was a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1963. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1922–2001
Tenure: 1963–1992 · 29 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1963	North Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Erickstad authored 974 published opinions for the court (1963–1993), plus 23 dissents and 26 concurrences. Most cited: Fischer v. Fischer (299 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. 163 of these were attributed to Erickstad 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
1966	Fischer v. Fischer	139 N.W.2d 845	299
1967	Nuelle Ex Rel. Reinhardt v. Wells	154 N.W.2d 364	109
1980	Asbridge v. North Dakota State Highway Commissioner	291 N.W.2d 739	93
1986	Hanson v. Williams County· Dissent†	389 N.W.2d 319	90
1992	Blotske v. Leidholm· Concurrence†	487 N.W.2d 607	89
1992	Hofsommer v. Hofsommer Excavating, Inc.	488 N.W.2d 380	89
1971	State v. Iverson	187 N.W.2d 1	86
1968	Iverson v. Lancaster	158 N.W.2d 507	86
1987	Kuntz v. State Highway Commissioner· Dissent†	405 N.W.2d 285	83
1979	Nastrom v. Nastrom	284 N.W.2d 576	79
1980	Lapp v. Lapp	293 N.W.2d 121	78
1985	Weir v. Weir	374 N.W.2d 858	75
1984	Bullock v. Bullock	354 N.W.2d 904	74
1975	State v. Allen	237 N.W.2d 154	73
1974	State v. Matthews· Concurrence†	216 N.W.2d 90	70

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,023 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 North Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Ralph John Erickstad on?: Ralph John Erickstad was a Justice of the North Dakota 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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29 years on the North Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).