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

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

Nebraska Supreme Court / Joined 1979 / Served to 1995

William C. Hastings

Justice, Nebraska Supreme Court

William C. Hastings was a Justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1921–2010
Tenure: 1979–1995 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Nebraska Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hastings authored 2,096 published opinions for the court (1974–1995), plus 7 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: In Re Interest of RG (298 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. 141 of these were attributed to Hastings 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
1991	In Re Interest of RG	470 N.W.2d 780	298
1994	Hoiengs v. County of Adams	516 N.W.2d 223	249
1993	State v. Van Ackeren	495 N.W.2d 630	196
1992	Murphy v. Spelts-Schultz Lumber Co.	481 N.W.2d 422	167
1992	In Re Interest of LV	482 N.W.2d 250	162
1990	Gottsch v. Bank of Stapleton	458 N.W.2d 443	159
1994	DeVaux v. DeVaux	514 N.W.2d 640	145
1992	State v. Richter	481 N.W.2d 200	144
1990	State v. Reynolds	457 N.W.2d 405	144
1993	Dowd v. First Omaha Securities Corp.	495 N.W.2d 36	136
1994	State v. Hirsch	511 N.W.2d 69	133
1991	In Re Interest of RR	475 N.W.2d 518	125
1990	State v. Kipf	450 N.W.2d 397	125
1990	Chadron Energy Corp. v. First National Bank†	459 N.W.2d 718	123
1994	State v. Dyer	513 N.W.2d 316	122

Showing the 15 most-cited of 2,112 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 Nebraska Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was William C. Hastings on?: William C. Hastings was a Justice of the Nebraska 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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16 years on the Nebraska Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).