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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Minnesota / Joined 2000 / Served to 2002

Sam Hanson

Judge, Court of Appeals of Minnesota

Sam Hanson was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Minnesota, who joined the court in 2000. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2000–2002 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	Court of Appeals of Minnesota	–	–

Education

William Mitchell College of Law

Judicial Record

In our data, Hanson authored 36 published opinions for the court (2001–2002), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: Schumacher v. Schumacher (56 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. 3 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
2001	Schumacher v. Schumacher	627 N.W.2d 725	56
2002	Occhino v. Grover	640 N.W.2d 357	35
2002	Porch v. General Motors Acceptance Corp.	642 N.W.2d 473	25
2001	Doering v. Doering	629 N.W.2d 124	22
2002	Marriage of Matson v. Matson	638 N.W.2d 462	14
2001	State v. Vanhouse†	634 N.W.2d 715	13
2002	Metge v. Central Neighborhood Improvement Ass'n	649 N.W.2d 488	12
2002	State Ex Rel. Hatch v. Employers Insurance of Wausau	644 N.W.2d 820	12
2001	Hamblin v. Alliant Techsystems, Inc.	636 N.W.2d 150	10
2001	Mollico v. Mollico	628 N.W.2d 637	10
2001	North Star Mutual Insurance Co v. Midwest Family Mutual Insurance Co.	634 N.W.2d 216	9
2002	State v. DeShay	645 N.W.2d 185	8
2001	Erickson v. Christie	622 N.W.2d 138	8
2002	Dakota Bank v. Eiesland	645 N.W.2d 177	7
2001	State v. Dalos	635 N.W.2d 94	7

Showing the 15 most-cited of 37 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 Court of Appeals of Minnesota reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Sam Hanson on?: Sam Hanson was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Minnesota.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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