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 1969 / Served to 1980

Warren J. Rees

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

Warren J. Rees was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1969. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1908 · age 118
Tenure: 1969–1980 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1969	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Grinnell College

Judicial Record

In our data, Rees authored 224 published opinions for the court (1969–1980), plus 19 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Monroe (110 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. 66 of these were attributed to Rees 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
1975	State v. Monroe	236 N.W.2d 24	110
1974	Brainard v. State· Dissent†	222 N.W.2d 711	110
1980	Bierkamp v. Rogers	293 N.W.2d 577	98
1978	Brody v. Ruby	267 N.W.2d 902	98
1971	Vermeer Ex Rel. Vermeer v. Sneller· Concurrence†	190 N.W.2d 389	81
1979	State v. Mark	286 N.W.2d 396	71
1979	Committee on Professional Ethics & Conduct of the Iowa State Bar Ass'n v. Durham	279 N.W.2d 280	62
1972	Hawkeye Security Insurance Co. v. Ford Motor Co.	199 N.W.2d 373	61
1980	State v. Hitchens	294 N.W.2d 686	58
1973	Freese v. Lemmon	210 N.W.2d 576	55
1979	Shook v. Crabb	281 N.W.2d 616	54
1970	Sprung Ex Rel. Sprung v. Rasmussen	180 N.W.2d 430	51
1972	Brown v. First National Bank of Mason City	193 N.W.2d 547	49
1971	State Ex Rel. Turner v. Iowa State Highway Commission	186 N.W.2d 141	49
1979	In Re Marriage of Winegard	278 N.W.2d 505	48

Showing the 15 most-cited of 246 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 Warren J. Rees on?: Warren J. Rees 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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11 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).