Smith v. Palmer

N.D. Iowa · 1998 · CourtListener

Cite as Smith v. Palmer, 24 F. Supp. 2d 955 (N.D. Iowa 1998)

District8th Cir.Gender-affirming care Health coverage & benefitsFavorable

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Proceedings

Opinion: District Court, N.D. Iowa · On CourtListener

Smith v. Palmer, 24 F. Supp. 2d 955 (N.D. Iowa 1998)

Filings on file (1 in 1 docket entry)

Filings on file
Date	No.	Document	Type	Pages	Source
		Document

Browse and search the 1 court document in the archive for this case.

Litigation

Court cases about transgender and other LGBTQ+ people · federal & state courts

Cases tracked

Case name Court Level Issue / type Circuit Outcome Year ≥ Year ≤

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Case	Court	Level	Cir.	Year	Issue / type	Outcome	Docs

Every case in the corpus. Click a case name for its overview; click any column to sort, again to reverse. Each case has one main issue and may raise others (shown as "also…"); the Issue filter finds a case by either. Issues were checked case by case in September 2026. Level, circuit and outcome come from the coded caselaw dataset, so some rows are blank where a case hasn't been coded yet.

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Cases by issue

Every tracked case once, under its main issue, split by the coded direction of its final ruling (the same reading as "Reached a final ruling" below): favorable or adverse to the LGBTQ-rights claim, or mixed. The empty part of each bar is cases with no coded ruling at the trial, circuit or Supreme Court stage yet, which is most of them; it is not a claim that they have no outcome. Choose a bar to list its cases.

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The coded direction at the HIGHEST stage a case reached — trial-level, circuit-court or Supreme Court only. A preliminary-injunction ruling never counts as final, and a "procedural, no direction" or "unclear" coding is excluded rather than shown as an outcome.

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Case duration

Filed to terminated, from real CourtListener docket dates, among cases where EVERY tracked docket has terminated (an open appellate docket alongside a closed district one is pending, not resolved). No stage-by-stage date exists in this corpus, so only this one span is shown; dates cover only the tracked-docket tier — see the coverage note below the numbers.

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Table view (stages, durations and circuits)

Expert witnesses

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A curated roster of the recurring expert witnesses in this litigation, with every declaration, expert report, affidavit, deposition and trial-testimony document the corpus holds for each, grouped by case. Coverage is limited by what has been pulled: expert material is heavily attachment-borne, so a witness who testified in ten cases may show fewer here, and some documents are marked in a larger filing — the testimony sits inside an appendix or exhibit set rather than as its own entry.

Judges

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The record counts how the judge voted, not how the case came out. Dissents and concurrences are parsed from the opinions themselves ("NIEMEYER, Circuit Judge, dissenting"), so a judge who dissented is scored against the panel's result — without that, Judge Niemeyer read 4–3 favorable to trans claimants. Partial dissents are shown but left out of the tally. Votes come from separate-writing headings and from the opinion's own joinder block ("Judge Richardson wrote a dissenting opinion, in which Judge Wilkinson, Judge Niemeyer… joined"), so a judge who joins a dissent without writing one still counts. Judges are resolved to real people against the Federal Judicial Center directory using the deciding court — there are 32 federal judges named Smith, and two Judge Pryors on the Eleventh Circuit. 195 ambiguous name/court pairs were dropped rather than merged, and a case with no opinion text in the corpus keeps the panel result for want of anything better. Small numbers are small numbers: three rulings is not a tendency.