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

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

Iowa Supreme Court / Joined 1959 / Served to 1967

T Eugene Thornton

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

T Eugene Thornton was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1959. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1911–1967
Tenure: 1959–1967 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1959	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Creighton University

Judicial Record

In our data, Thornton authored 176 published opinions for the court (1959–1966), plus 12 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Fabricius v. Montgomery Elevator Company (85 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. 26 of these were attributed to Thornton 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
1963	Fabricius v. Montgomery Elevator Company	121 N.W.2d 361	85
1963	State v. Stump· Dissent†	119 N.W.2d 210	73
1963	Burcham v. Farmers Insurance Exchange	121 N.W.2d 500	54
1964	Mazur v. Grantham	125 N.W.2d 807	53
1961	Ruud v. Grimm	110 N.W.2d 321	50
1962	Corkery v. Greenberg	114 N.W.2d 327	43
1960	Hamdorf v. Corrie	101 N.W.2d 836	42
1965	Charles v. Epperson & Company	137 N.W.2d 605	41
1963	Hardwick Ex Rel. Bartz v. Bublitz	119 N.W.2d 886	41
1964	In Re Estate of Larson	131 N.W.2d 503	40
1962	Nelson v. Iowa State Highway Commission	115 N.W.2d 695	39
1962	Edge v. Brice	113 N.W.2d 755	39
1959	Von Tersch v. Ahrendsen	99 N.W.2d 287	36
1963	In Re Bierstedt's Estate	119 N.W.2d 234	35
1965	Richardson v. City of Jefferson	134 N.W.2d 528	33

Showing the 15 most-cited of 191 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 Iowa Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was T Eugene Thornton on?: T Eugene Thornton was a Justice of the Iowa 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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8 years on the Iowa Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).