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

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

Utah Court of Appeals / Joined 1987 / Served to 2009

Russell W. Bench

Judge, Utah Court of Appeals

Russell W. Bench was a Judge of the Utah Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1987. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1987–2009 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1987	Utah Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Bench authored 522 published opinions for the court (1987–2009), plus 49 dissents and 73 concurrences. Most cited: Five F, L.L.C. v. Heritage Savings Bank (173 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. 500 of these were attributed to Bench 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
2003	Five F, L.L.C. v. Heritage Savings Bank†	2003 UT App 373	173
1990	State v. Webb	790 P.2d 65	78
1989	Maughan v. Maughan	770 P.2d 156	60
1990	Village Inn Apartments v. State Farm Fire & Casualty Co.†	790 P.2d 581	52
1994	State ex rel. E.H. v. A.H.†	880 P.2d 11	50
1993	State v. Garrett†	849 P.2d 578	50
1990	State v. Lovegren	798 P.2d 767	48
2000	Franklin Covey Client Sales, Inc. v. Melvin†	2 P.3d 451	44
1991	Howell v. Howell· Concurrence†	806 P.2d 1209	42
1988	State in Interest of JRT v. Timperly†	750 P.2d 1234	42
1987	Israel Pagan Estate v. Cannon	746 P.2d 785	42
1994	Olympus Hills Shopping Center, Ltd. v. Smith's Food & Drug Centers, Inc.· Concurrence†	889 P.2d 445	40
1991	Adams v. Board of Review of Indus. Com'n†	821 P.2d 1	40
1994	State v. Cosey· Concurrence†	873 P.2d 1177	39
1991	Tolman v. Salt Lake County Attorney	818 P.2d 23	39

Showing the 15 most-cited of 644 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 Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Russell W. Bench on?: Russell W. Bench was a Judge of the Utah Court of Appeals.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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22 years on the Utah Court of Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).