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 1917 / Served to 1934

Truman S. Stevens

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Truman S. Stevens was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1917. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1917–1934 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1917	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Stevens authored 950 published opinions for the court (1917–1934), plus 22 dissents and 12 concurrences. Most cited: Smith v. Thompson (45 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. 456 of these were attributed to Stevens 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
1934	Smith v. Thompson· Dissent	258 N.W. 190	45
1926	McCornack v. Central State Bank· Concurrence	211 N.W. 542	43
1928	American Asphalt Roof Corp. v. Shankland	219 N.W. 23	42
1934	Des Moines Joint Stock Land Bank v. Nordholm· Dissent	253 N.W. 701	39
1930	Newburn v. Newburn	231 N.W. 389	36
1924	Griswold Land & Credit Co. v. County of Calhoun†	198 Iowa 1240	36
1933	Hart v. Hinkley	247 N.W. 258	34
1928	McDonald v. Robinson	224 N.W. 820	33
1931	Smith v. City of Iowa City	239 N.W. 29	32
1931	Miller v. Laing	236 N.W. 378	32
1919	Fidelity & Casualty Co. v. Cedar Valley Electric Co.†	187 Iowa 1014	32
1928	State v. Marshall· Dissent	220 N.W. 106	31
1933	State Ex Rel. Welsh v. Darling	246 N.W. 390	30
1920	Reynolds v. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance†	189 Iowa 76	30
1925	Rehmann v. City of Des Moines	204 N.W. 267	29

Showing the 15 most-cited of 984 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 Truman S. Stevens on?: Truman S. Stevens 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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17 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).