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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Louisiana / Joined 1997 / Served to 2009

Chet D. Traylor

Justice, Supreme Court of Louisiana

Chet D. Traylor was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, who joined the court in 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1945 · age 81
Tenure: 1997–2009 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	Supreme Court of Louisiana	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Traylor authored 465 published opinions for the court (1997–2009), plus 8 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Samaha v. Rau (695 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. 50 of these were attributed to Traylor 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
2008	Samaha v. Rau	977 So. 2d 880	695
2000	State v. Smith	766 So. 2d 501	535
1997	White v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.	699 So. 2d 1081	419
2006	State v. Leger	936 So. 2d 108	398
2007	State v. Draughn	950 So. 2d 583	292
2006	State v. Ordodi	946 So. 2d 654	275
1998	Reed v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.	708 So. 2d 362	235
2009	State v. Bertrand†	6 So. 3d 738	224
2008	Sher v. Lafayette Ins. Co.	988 So. 2d 186	188
2006	State v. Weary	931 So. 2d 297	172
1999	State v. Thibodeaux	750 So. 2d 916	161
2000	State v. Hoffman	768 So. 2d 542	159
1999	State v. Hampton	750 So. 2d 867	157
2002	Campbell v. Melton	817 So. 2d 69	148
1999	State v. Howard	751 So. 2d 783	148

Showing the 15 most-cited of 477 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 Louisiana reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Chet D. Traylor on?: Chet D. Traylor was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana.

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