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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Minnesota Supreme Court / Joined 2002 / Served to 2008

Sam Hanson

Justice, Minnesota Supreme Court

Sam Hanson was a Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2002. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1939 · age 87
Tenure: 2002–2008 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2002	Minnesota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

William Mitchell College of Law

Judicial Record

In our data, Hanson authored 97 published opinions for the court (2003–2007), plus 23 dissents and 25 concurrences. Most cited: Leake v. State (146 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. 57 of these were attributed to Hanson 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
2007	Leake v. State· Dissent†	737 N.W.2d 531	146
2006	State v. Caulfield	722 N.W.2d 304	113
2007	Hoyt Properties, Inc. v. Production Resource Group, L.L.C.· Dissent†	736 N.W.2d 313	109
2004	State v. Jones· Concurrence†	678 N.W.2d 1	94
2006	Schroeder v. St. Louis County· Concurrence†	708 N.W.2d 497	86
2003	State v. Richardson· Concurrence†	670 N.W.2d 267	77
2006	State v. Osborne	715 N.W.2d 436	75
2006	Deegan v. State	711 N.W.2d 89	71
2006	State v. Jackson· Concurrence†	714 N.W.2d 681	69
2005	State v. Carter	697 N.W.2d 199	69
2003	Motorsports Racing Plus, Inc. v. Arctic Cat Sales, Inc.	666 N.W.2d 320	68
2003	Butala v. State· Dissent†	664 N.W.2d 333	67
2007	Bjerke v. Johnson	742 N.W.2d 660	65
2007	State v. Mauer	741 N.W.2d 107	64
2006	State v. Robinson	718 N.W.2d 400	64

Showing the 15 most-cited of 145 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 Minnesota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Sam Hanson on?: Sam Hanson was a Justice of the Minnesota 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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5 years on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).