How do judges of the South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?

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

South Dakota Supreme Court / Joined 2002 / Former Justice

Steven L. Zinter

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

Steven L. Zinter was a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2002. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2002 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2002	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of South Dakota
University of South Dakota

Judicial Record

In our data, Zinter authored 325 published opinions for the court (1987–2018), plus 25 dissents and 97 concurrences. Most cited: Nygaard v. Sioux Valley Hospitals & Health System (68 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. 281 of these were attributed to Zinter 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	Nygaard v. Sioux Valley Hospitals & Health System	2007 SD 34	68
2002	State v. Tuttle· Concurrence†	2002 SD 94	62
1992	Chambers v. Dakotah Charter, Inc.	488 N.W.2d 63	57
2005	Behrens v. Wedmore	2005 SD 79	51
2013	Bertelsen v. Allstate Insurance Co.†	2013 S.D. 44	49
2004	State v. Akuba	2004 SD 94	47
2006	People ex rel. L.S.· Concurrence†	721 N.W.2d 83	44
1995	Boever v. South Dakota Board of Accountancy	526 N.W.2d 747	44
2004	Schulte v. Long· Concurrence†	2004 SD 102	43
2006	Benson v. State· Concurrence†	2006 SD 8	42
2002	State v. Owens	2002 SD 42	42
2008	State v. Bowker· Concurrence†	2008 SD 61	41
2004	State v. Schwartz· Concurrence†	2004 SD 123	41
2010	Janis v. Nash Finch Co.· Concurrence†	2010 SD 27	40
2009	State v. Lemler	2009 SD 86	40

Showing the 15 most-cited of 447 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 South Dakota Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Steven L. Zinter on?: Steven L. Zinter was a Justice of the South Dakota 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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24 years on the South Dakota Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).