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

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

South Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 1977 / Served to 1991

Robert E. Morgan

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

Robert E. Morgan was a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1924–2009
Tenure: 1977–1991 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Creighton University

Judicial Record

In our data, Morgan authored 435 published opinions for the court (1977–1991), plus 49 dissents and 77 concurrences. Most cited: Permann v. South Dakota Department of Labor, Unemployment Insurance Division (281 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. 178 of these were attributed to Morgan 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
1987	Permann v. South Dakota Department of Labor, Unemployment Insurance Division	411 N.W.2d 113	281
1984	Gross v. Gross	355 N.W.2d 4	118
1982	Hartpence v. Youth Forestry Camp	325 N.W.2d 292	111
1981	State v. Brammer	304 N.W.2d 111	105
1980	Hanks v. Hanks	296 N.W.2d 523	101
1986	State v. Rufener· Concurrence†	392 N.W.2d 424	93
1984	State v. McCafferty	356 N.W.2d 159	88
1978	In re N. J. W.†	273 N.W.2d 134	87
1983	Osterkamp v. Alkota Manufacturing, Inc.	332 N.W.2d 275	86
1990	Taggart v. Ford Motor Credit Co.	462 N.W.2d 493	81
1988	Sharp v. Sharp· Concurrence†	422 N.W.2d 443	81
1984	In re the Termination of Parental Rights over D.H.†	354 N.W.2d 185	81
1981	Johnson v. John Deere Co.	306 N.W.2d 231	81
1982	Walz v. City of Hudson· Concurrence†	327 N.W.2d 120	77
1985	Temple v. Temple	365 N.W.2d 561	74

Showing the 15 most-cited of 561 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 South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Robert E. Morgan on?: Robert E. Morgan was a Justice of the South 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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14 years on the South Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).