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

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

Colorado Supreme Court / Joined 1928 / Served to 1957

Wilbur M. Alter

Justice, Colorado Supreme Court

Wilbur M. Alter was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1928. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1879–1967
Tenure: 1928–1957 · 29 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1928	Colorado Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Alter authored 316 published opinions for the court (1929–1956), plus 2 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Swift v. Smith (51 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. 36 of these were attributed to Alter 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
1948	Swift v. Smith	201 P.2d 609	51
1931	Kolkman v. People	300 P. 575	50
1953	Gonzales v. People	264 P.2d 508	49
1951	Julius Hyman & Co. v. Velsicol Corp.	233 P.2d 977	47
1953	Industrial Commission v. Plains Utility Co.	259 P.2d 282	44
1947	Carlson v. District Court	180 P.2d 525	44
1945	Bruner v. People	156 P.2d 111	43
1955	Ferguson v. Hurford	290 P.2d 229	41
1950	Kelly v. People	215 P.2d 336	40
1946	O'Day v. People	166 P.2d 789	40
1930	City & County of Denver v. Taylor	292 P. 594	40
1947	Parrish v. De Remer	187 P.2d 597	37
1952	Kallnbach v. People	242 P.2d 222	36
1947	Trueblood v. Pierce	179 P.2d 671	36
1929	Walton v. Walton	278 P. 780	36

Showing the 15 most-cited of 322 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 Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Wilbur M. Alter on?: Wilbur M. Alter was a Justice of the Colorado 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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29 years on the Colorado Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).