How do judges of the Utah Supreme Court reach the bench?

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

Utah Supreme Court / Joined 2003 / Former Justice

Ronald E. Nehring

Justice, Utah Supreme Court

Ronald E. Nehring was a Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2003. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1947 · age 79
Tenure: 2003 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Utah Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Cornell University
University of Utah

Judicial Record

In our data, Nehring authored 180 published opinions for the court (2003–2015), plus 9 dissents and 20 concurrences. Most cited: Allen v. Friel (223 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. 96 of these were attributed to Nehring 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
2008	Allen v. Friel	2008 UT 56	223
2014	America West Bank Members L.C. v. State†	2014 UT 49	119
2004	State v. Brake	2004 UT 95	117
2015	State v. Houston†	2015 UT 40	94
2010	State v. Ott	2010 UT 1	77
2012	Reighard v. Yates†	285 P.3d 1168	70
2006	Saleh v. Farmers Insurance Exchange	2006 UT 20	70
2015	Graves v. North Eastern Services, Inc.· Dissent†	2015 UT 28	68
2004	Eggert v. Wasatch Energy Corp.· Concurrence†	2004 UT 28	68
2006	State v. Robison	2006 UT 65	66
2011	State v. Lenkart†	2011 UT 27	63
2007	State v. Rodriguez	2007 UT 15	62
2015	State v. Jones†	2015 UT 19	61
2009	O'DEA v. Olea	2009 UT 46	60
2007	State v. Rhinehart	2007 UT 61	59

Showing the 15 most-cited of 209 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 Utah Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Ronald E. Nehring on?: Ronald E. Nehring was a Justice of the Utah 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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23 years on the Utah Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).