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 1876 / Served to 1888

William H. Seevers

Justice, Iowa Supreme Court

William H. Seevers was a Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1876. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1820–1895
Tenure: 1876–1888 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1876	Iowa Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Seevers authored 917 published opinions for the court (1876–1888), plus 13 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Koehler & Lange v. Hill (87 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. 945 of these were attributed to Seevers 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
1883	Koehler & Lange v. Hill†	60 Iowa 543	87
1879	State v. Kaufman†	51 Iowa 578	82
1876	Eadie, Guilford & Co. v. Ashbaugh†	44 Iowa 519	53
1876	Des Moines Gas Co. v. City of Des Moines†	44 Iowa 505	46
1876	French v. City of Burlington†	42 Iowa 614	45
1887	Stevenson v. Polk†	71 Iowa 278	38
1881	Fitzgerald v. McCarty†	55 Iowa 702	36
1878	State v. Northrup†	48 Iowa 583	36
1877	Fry v. Dubuque & Southwestern Railway Co.†	45 Iowa 416	36
1876	McKinley v. C. & N. W. R.†	44 Iowa 314	36
1883	Jayne v. Drorbaugh†	63 Iowa 711	35
1883	Sloan v. Central Iowa Railway Co.†	62 Iowa 728	33
1887	Warfield, Howell & Co. v. Marshall County Canning Co.†	72 Iowa 666	32
1880	Stanley v. City of Davenport†	54 Iowa 463	32
1884	State v. Carman· Dissent†	63 Iowa 130	31

Showing the 15 most-cited of 949 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 H. Seevers on?: William H. Seevers 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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12 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).