The Utah Supreme Court will get three new justices after Justice Diana Hagen’s resignation in early May and lawmakers’ two-seat expansion of the court earlier this year. The state’s highest court already has a fresh face in Justice John Nielsen, who was confirmed last November after John Pearce retired.
That means when the three new justices are seated, presumably later this year, a majority of voices on the court will have been on the job for less than a year.
Brennan Center for Justice counsel Michael Milov-Cordoba said that’s not normal.
“We found that, on average, justices tend to spend about 13 years on the bench,” he said. “And in Utah, it's 15 years. So to have more than half the bench cycling on and off is pretty unusual.”
Tenure on state supreme courts is especially important, he said, because judges hear a wide range of cases, from family law to constitutional matters.
”When your docket is that broad, experience really does matter, and I think the tenure numbers reflect that,” he said.
University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law professor Louisa Heiny agrees that tenure and experience on the bench matter, but the background of future nominees could be a bigger indicator of their understanding of the job.
“If a judge is coming up from the Utah Court of Appeals, they've got that range of experience,” she said. “They understand how an appellate court works, and they've had exposure to so many different types of law. By that same token, I think a judge coming up out of the district courts, so one of our trial courts in Utah, would also do quite well.”
Utah State Bar Executive Director Elizabeth Wright feels similarly. For her, the working relationship between the justices will be the biggest hurdle. That’s because clerks of the court, she said, will be able to help pick up any slack and provide “lots of help with the writing and the research.”
“To some extent, being on the Supreme Court is new for everybody,” she said. “Like any job, it'll take them a while to get to know the others or what issues are particularly important to them.”
The forthcoming fresh batch of personalities at the Utah Supreme Court is also happening against a backdrop of extreme tension between the judiciary and the Legislature.
Several high-profile rulings in recent years have seen the GOP supermajority find themselves on the losing side — most notably in the state’s lengthy redistricting saga and the legal back and forth over a near-total abortion ban. Lawmakers have not been shy about voicing their displeasure at those decisions. There have been dozens of proposed bills to change the way courts function in recent years. Lawmakers even passed a resolution condemning both the Utah Supreme Court and the district court over redistricting decisions and what they characterized as an “activist rewriting of the Utah Constitution” in late 2025.
Hagen’s resignation was also caught up in that tension as she faced accusations of an inappropriate relationship with a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the redistricting case. She denies any conflict of interest while a judge and recused herself.
Her decision to resign, she said, was to shield her family from scrutiny and avoid compromising the “effective functioning and independence of Utah’s judiciary.”
Utah’s forthcoming Supreme Court justices will not have had direct involvement with either the redistricting or abortion rulings. But they will preside over any future developments in those cases.
Nielsen, the newest judge, was on the court when it dismissed an appeal in the redistricting case in February.
Milov-Cordoba said it’s hard not to see the changes to the court as “politically motivated and a form of court packing.”
“First, the court itself was not asking for additional justices, and [Chief Justice Matthew Durrant] publicly opposed the Legislature's effort to expand the court before the Legislature passed it,” he said. “The second is that the expansion followed multiple high-profile losses by the state that themselves triggered legislation targeting the courts.”
Not only that, he said, but when you take into consideration past legislative efforts to alter how courts function, “it certainly looks like the Legislature is engaged in a broad assault on the independence of the Utah Supreme Court.”
Last November, in his monthly news conference, Gov. Spencer Cox dismissed the criticism that adding justices to the court was akin to packing it for a more favorable outcome.
“It would also be weird to look at court packing when, you know, it's been Republican governors and Republican senators that have made all of the appointments,” he said at that time. “I've never looked at it that way.”
Still, experts in Utah stress that just because the state Supreme Court is getting new judges, that doesn’t mean they will rule differently from their predecessors.
“Once they get together, once they learn each other, you know, start exchanging ideas, I think it's hard to say they are going to rule one way or the other,” Wright said. “I just think our [judicial nomination] process is good enough where we're going to find good applicants, and once they get together and they start conferencing together, and you know, discussing things with each other and with their clerks, we might be surprised.”
Heiny also cautioned against anyone trying to read tea leaves.
“I think it's a mistake at the point where you're just thinking about a case that is going to go to a court, might go to a court or has just been filed with a court, looking at that and saying, ‘Oh, I know how this is going to turn out.’”
The application process for the vacancy created by Justice Hagen’s resignation is already open. The deadline to apply is June 12. The other two vacancies could be filled later this year.
Gov. Cox will select nominees from the pool of applicants, and those will be sent to the state Senate for confirmation.
Editor’s note: KUER is a licensee of the University of Utah but operates as an editorially independent news organization.
