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 1943 / Served to 1958

William A. Smith

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

William A. Smith was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1943. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1870 · age 156
Tenure: 1943–1958 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1943	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 254 published opinions for the court (1943–1957), plus 27 dissents and 14 concurrences. Most cited: Soreide v. Vilas & Company (71 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. 28 of these were attributed to Smith 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
1956	Soreide v. Vilas & Company· Dissent†	78 N.W.2d 41	71
1954	Miller v. Lawlor	66 N.W.2d 267	49
1954	Florke v. Peterson	65 N.W.2d 372	47
1946	Dain Manufacturing Co. v. Iowa State Tax Commission	22 N.W.2d 786	46
1947	Birmingham v. Rice Bros.· Dissent	26 N.W.2d 39	45
1948	State v. Hartung	30 N.W.2d 491	43
1947	O'Dell v. O'Dell· Dissent	26 N.W.2d 401	43
1943	Lasell v. Tri-States Theatre Corp.· Dissent	11 N.W.2d 36	40
1948	In Re Estate of Syverson· Dissent	32 N.W.2d 799	37
1945	Kohl v. Arp	17 N.W.2d 824	35
1953	General Mills, Inc. v. Prall	56 N.W.2d 596	34
1948	Hatchery v. Iowa Employment Security Commission	33 N.W.2d 498	34
1947	First v. Byrne	28 N.W.2d 509	34
1951	State v. Kobylasz	47 N.W.2d 167	33
1950	Hebert Ex Rel. Hebert v. Allen	41 N.W.2d 240	33

Showing the 15 most-cited of 295 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 William A. Smith on?: William A. Smith 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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15 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).