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 1939 / Served to 1962

William L. Bliss

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

William L. Bliss was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1939. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1876 · age 150
Tenure: 1939–1962 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1939	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Drake University

Judicial Record

In our data, Bliss authored 379 published opinions for the court (1932–1958), plus 13 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Grismore v. Consolidated Products Co. (235 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. 16 of these were attributed to Bliss 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
1942	Grismore v. Consolidated Products Co.	5 N.W.2d 646	235
1940	Whetstine v. Moravec	291 N.W. 425	80
1943	State v. Wilson	11 N.W.2d 737	68
1954	Sebastian v. Wood	66 N.W.2d 841	66
1940	Pierce v. Green	294 N.W. 237	64
1956	Lynch v. Uhlenhopp· Dissent†	78 N.W.2d 491	60
1950	Helton v. Crawley	41 N.W.2d 60	56
1948	Moulton v. Iowa Employment Security Commission	34 N.W.2d 211	55
1942	Liddick v. City of Council Bluffs	5 N.W.2d 361	55
1943	Lawson v. Fordyce	12 N.W.2d 301	53
1945	Shaw v. Addison	18 N.W.2d 796	51
1943	Pines v. District Court	10 N.W.2d 574	51
1943	Benschoter v. Hakes· Dissent	8 N.W.2d 481	49
1939	Merritt v. Easterly	284 N.W. 397	46
1948	Korf v. Fleming	32 N.W.2d 85	45

Showing the 15 most-cited of 395 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 L. Bliss on?: William L. Bliss 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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23 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).