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

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

Supreme Court of Indiana / Joined 1855 / Served to 1857

Samuel B. Gookins

Justice, Supreme Court of Indiana

Samuel B. Gookins was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana (5 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1855. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1809–1880
Tenure: 1855–1857 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1855	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Gookins authored 119 published opinions for the court (1855–1857). Most cited: Haynes v. Thomas (66 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. 119 of these were attributed to Gookins 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
1855	Haynes v. Thomas†	7 Ind. 38	66
1857	Thompson v. Thompson†	9 Ind. 323	51
1856	Wright v. Defrees†	8 Ind. 298	50
1855	Common Council v. Croas†	7 Ind. 9	40
1855	Wiggins v. Keizer†	6 Ind. 252	38
1856	Bird v. Lanius†	7 Ind. 615	31
1857	Hays v. State†	8 Ind. 425	28
1857	Myers v. Dodd†	9 Ind. 290	26
1857	Rockhill v. Spraggs†	9 Ind. 30	25
1856	City of Logansport v. Dunn†	8 Ind. 378	24
1855	Simpson v. Wilson†	6 Ind. 474	23
1856	Conner v. Winton†	7 Ind. 523	21
1856	Lawrenceburgh & Upper Mississippi Railroad v. Montgomery†	7 Ind. 474	19
1857	State ex rel. Haven v. Melogue†	9 Ind. 196	18
1855	Stayton v. Hulings†	7 Ind. 144	18

Showing the 15 most-cited of 119 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 Supreme Court of Indiana reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Samuel B. Gookins on?: Samuel B. Gookins was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana.

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 Supreme Court of Indiana. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).