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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Arkansas / Joined 1957 / Served to 1980

Carleton Harris

Justice, Supreme Court of Arkansas

Carleton Harris was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas, who joined the court in 1957. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1909–1980
Tenure: 1957–1980 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1957	Supreme Court of Arkansas	–	–

Education

Cumberland University

Judicial Record

In our data, Harris authored 848 published opinions for the court (1957–1979), plus 119 dissents and 26 concurrences. Most cited: Parish v. Pitts (139 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. 741 of these were attributed to Harris 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
1968	Parish v. Pitts· Dissent†	429 S.W.2d 45	139
1966	Byrd v. State†	240 Ark. 743	115
1972	Tucker v. Pulaski Federal Savings & Loan Association	481 S.W.2d 725	73
1975	Arkansas Gazette Company v. Pickens	522 S.W.2d 350	67
1962	Walton v. Tull· Dissent†	356 S.W.2d 20	67
1975	Williams v. State· Dissent†	523 S.W.2d 377	62
1978	McCoy Farms, Inc. v. J & M McKEE· Dissent†	563 S.W.2d 409	58
1971	Andrews v. State	472 S.W.2d 86	53
1957	Leach v. Leach· Dissent†	300 S.W.2d 15	48
1974	Nelson v. State	513 S.W.2d 496	47
1979	Arkansas Public Service Commission v. Pulaski County Board of Equalization	582 S.W.2d 942	45
1972	Wood v. Goodson· Concurrence†	485 S.W.2d 213	45
1977	Pope v. State· Dissent†	557 S.W.2d 887	44
1965	Miller v. State· Concurrence†	394 S.W.2d 601	44
1962	Kapp v. Sullivan Chevrolet Co.	353 S.W.2d 5	43

Showing the 15 most-cited of 993 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 Supreme Court of Arkansas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Carleton Harris on?: Carleton Harris was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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23 years on the Supreme Court of Arkansas. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).