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

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

Utah Supreme Court / Joined 2010 / Former Justice

Thomas Rex Lee

Justice, Utah Supreme Court

Thomas Rex Lee was a Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2010. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1943 · age 83
Tenure: 2010 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2010	Utah Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Lee authored 156 published opinions for the court (2011–2019), plus 26 dissents and 33 concurrences. Most cited: Marion Energy, Inc. v. KFJ Ranch Partnership (208 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. 215 of these were attributed to Lee 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
2011	Marion Energy, Inc. v. KFJ Ranch Partnership· Dissent†	2011 UT 50	208
2014	State v. Nielsen†	2014 UT 10	147
2011	Archuleta v. Galetka†	2011 UT 73	116
2011	Olsen v. Eagle Mountain City†	2011 UT 10	110
2011	J.M.W. v. T.I.Z.· Concurrence†	266 P.3d 702	105
2012	Manzanares v. Byington†	308 P.3d 382	100
2011	State v. Clark†	2011 UT 23	93
2017	State v. Thornton†	2017 UT 9	89
2017	State v. Hummel†	2017 UT 19	78
2015	State v. Rasabout· Concurrence†	2015 UT 72	75
2012	B.R. v. West†	275 P.3d 228	75
2016	State v. McNeil· Concurrence†	2016 UT 3	73
2019	Brady v. Park†	2019 UT 16	71
2012	State v. Verde†	296 P.3d 673	70
2015	Graves v. North Eastern Services, Inc.†	2015 UT 28	68

Showing the 15 most-cited of 215 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 Utah Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Thomas Rex Lee on?: Thomas Rex Lee was a Justice of the Utah 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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16 years on the Utah Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).