‘Narrow focus’

The intellectual stretching that comes from practicing law is just one reason Dana (Wade) Oxley says she was first drawn to the profession.

Oxley, a 1986 graduate of Greenfield High School and currently a resident of Swisher, will relocate now to the Des Moines metro and was due to assume her new position today.

Oxley was appointed to the supreme court recently by Gov. Kim Reynolds.

"I was pretty interested in accounting, but one of the classes I took as part of my undergrad was a business law class, so that was probably my first interest in the law. Toward the end of my undergrad, my sister's husband was then at law school at Drake. My parents moved to Arizona when I was in college, so I lived with my sister and her husband during the summer and was around some law school students at that time," Oxley explained. "My first job out of college was with the Iowa Credit Union Division. That involved enforcing regulations. A lot of that was auditing but the part about getting up to speed, reading the regulations and enforcing the regulations, that was another thing that piqued my interest as well and led me to go to law school."

Oxley completed her undergraduate education at the University of Northern Iowa. She said that business law class and being around the law students she was around led her to be around cases, statutes, and learned the difference between the two, which she found to be a challenging endeavor.

"I suppose law students, if you spend any time around them, they like to sit around and philosophise about the law, about what the law ought to be and what it should be," Oxley said. "That was kind of another exposure, at least, to what law school looks like."

Oxley has worked with Shuttleworth and Ingersoll, PLC in Cedar Rapids since 2011. Before joining this firm for her current term, she clerked one year for an appellate judge, worked for a short time for the firm she's with now, then went and clerked for a decade with a federal appellate judge before going back to Shuttleworth and Ingersoll.

Following the death of Chief Justice Mark Cady in November, Oxley was one who applied to become a justice on Iowa's highest court. She was very pleased to be appointed.

"As an appellate judge, you really get to dig into legal issues that are not necessarily decided issues, really dig into two sides to an argument and determine which argument is more persuasive. That's kind of been a dream job but I didn't necessarily track my career to be a judge. When Justice Cady's opening came up, that's when I decided to apply."

Oxley explained that there are seven justices who sit on the Iowa Supreme Court. The court is discretionary on what court it takes on. In Iowa, cases that lose at the district court level can appeal with the supreme court. The supreme court can then review that case and either take on the appeal or deflect the case back to a court of appeals if the case is a matter that has already been decided before.

"If it raises an issue that has already been decided legally and it's just a matter of applying that law to the particular case, those cases would be deflected back to the court of appeals," Oxley said. "I think in Iowa, around 10% of the cases that get appealed stay at the supreme court and the other 90% go back to the court of appeals. The supreme court really kind of reserves for itself the cases that are involving issues where the legal issues haven't been decided before or there's some kind of controversy in the law."

Oxley was born in Missouri, the daughter of farmers who were then hired to come manage a farm near Stanzel east of Greenfield when she was 11. She explained that her farm upbringing is something that still sticks with her today.

"We always lived on a farm and I guess I was always a pretty typical farm kid. I rode the bus to and from school, had chores and things at home. I was involved in things at school but some of that kind of depended upon being able to get a ride home from school. We went to church at Immanuel Lutheran Church and got pretty involved in church there as well," Oxley said. "I learned hard work from that. Growing up on a farm, I loved being a farm kid, growing up in the country. We had horses we used to do things with the cattle so I was very much an outside person. I learned a lot about hard work, getting work done, but also about having fun."

Oxley stated she has a "narrow focus" going forward to decide cases based on how the law has been set by legislators.

"A lot of these cases might be in areas where the law might not be very well developed or decided," Oxley said. "A lot of that, then, is about bringing clarity to the law so others going forward will know what the law is and not have to go forward with the same kind of litigation."