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 1846 / Served to 1879

Samuel E. Perkins

Justice, Supreme Court of Indiana

Samuel E. Perkins was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana (5 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1846. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1811–1879
Tenure: 1846–1879 · 32 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1846	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–
1877	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Perkins authored 1,468 published opinions for the court (1846–1879), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: Flournoy v. City of Jeffersonville (101 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. 1,474 of these were attributed to Perkins 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
1861	Flournoy v. City of Jeffersonville†	17 Ind. 169	101
1859	Dukes v. State†	11 Ind. 557	75
1862	Snowden v. Wilas†	19 Ind. 10	67
1861	Heaston v. Cincinnati & Fort Wayne Railroad†	16 Ind. 275	61
1860	McCorkle v. State†	14 Ind. 39	59
1860	Jackson v. State†	14 Ind. 327	58
1857	Gatling v. Newell†	9 Ind. 572	57
1877	Pettis v. Johnson†	56 Ind. 139	56
1859	Ohio & Mississippi Railroad v. Tindall†	13 Ind. 366	56
1863	Ristine v. State ex rel. Board of Commissioners of the Sinking Fund†	20 Ind. 328	54
1864	Peoria Marine & Fire Insurance v. Walser†	22 Ind. 73	50
1860	Long v. Morrison†	14 Ind. 595	50
1858	Hall v. State†	8 Ind. 439	50
1858	Dearmond v. Dearmond†	10 Ind. 191	48
1862	State ex rel. Leal v. Jones†	19 Ind. 356	47

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,474 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 E. Perkins on?: Samuel E. Perkins 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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32 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).