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 1920 / Served to 1925

Thomas Arthur

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Thomas Arthur was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1920. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1920–1925 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1920	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Arthur authored 253 published opinions for the court (1920–1925), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: McLeland v. Marshall County (28 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. 218 of these were attributed to Arthur 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
1924	McLeland v. Marshall County	201 N.W. 401	28
1922	Christensen v. Hauff Bros.†	193 Iowa 1084	27
1922	State v. Boyd†	195 Iowa 1091	26
1922	Brown v. McAdoo†	195 Iowa 286	24
1925	Leach v. Exchange State Bank· Separate	203 N.W. 31	21
1923	Root v. Shadbolt & Middleton†	195 Iowa 1225	21
1921	Thomas v. Locomotive Engineers' Mutual Life & Accident Insurance†	191 Iowa 1152	20
1923	First National Bank v. Anderson†	196 Iowa 587	19
1923	State v. Williams· Dissent†	195 Iowa 785	16
1923	State v. Maupin†	196 Iowa 904	16
1922	In re Estate of Austin†	194 Iowa 1217	16
1924	Iowa Electric Co. v. Incorporated Town of Winthrop†	198 Iowa 196	15
1924	State v. Gregory†	198 Iowa 316	15
1922	Andrews v. Western Asphalt Paving Corp.†	193 Iowa 1047	14
1922	State v. Wallack†	193 Iowa 941	14

Showing the 15 most-cited of 255 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 Thomas Arthur on?: Thomas Arthur 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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4 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).