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 1937 / Served to 1962

Vernon R. Sickel

Justice, South Dakota Supreme Court

Vernon R. Sickel was a Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1937. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1888 · age 138
Tenure: 1937–1962 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1937	South Dakota Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Sickel authored 131 published opinions for the court (1939–1956), plus 26 dissents and 11 concurrences. Most cited: Allen v. McLain (38 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. 38 of these were attributed to Sickel 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
1955	Allen v. McLain· Dissent†	69 N.W.2d 390	38
1951	Carr v. Preslar· Concurrence†	47 N.W.2d 497	38
1949	Simons v. Kidd	38 N.W.2d 883	37
1943	State Ex Rel. Parker v. Youngquist	11 N.W.2d 84	32
1947	Boekelheide v. Snyder	26 N.W.2d 74	31
1949	Lien v. Northwestern Engineering Co.· Dissent	39 N.W.2d 483	30
1946	State Ex Rel. Henning v. Jameson	22 N.W.2d 731	29
1945	Crilly v. Morris· Dissent	19 N.W.2d 836	29
1944	Hodkinson v. Parker	16 N.W.2d 924	29
1955	Argo Oil Corporation v. Lathrop	72 N.W.2d 431	28
1955	Standard Casualty Company v. Boyd· Dissent†	71 N.W.2d 450	26
1944	State v. Painter	17 N.W.2d 12	26
1950	City of Bristol v. Horter	43 N.W.2d 543	24
1942	Williams v. Stanley County Board of Equalization	7 N.W.2d 148	24
1946	Nelson v. Nelson	24 N.W.2d 327	23

Showing the 15 most-cited of 169 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 Vernon R. Sickel on?: Vernon R. Sickel 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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25 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).