How do judges of the Kentucky Court of Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Kentucky Court of Appeals / Joined 2007 / Active

Denise Clayton

Judge, Kentucky Court of Appeals

Denise Clayton is a Judge of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, serving since 2007. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2007 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2007	Kentucky Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

Defiance College

Judicial Record

In our data, Clayton authored 139 published opinions for the court (1984–2018), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: Wolf Creek Collieries v. Crum (142 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. 80 of these were attributed to Clayton 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
1984	Wolf Creek Collieries v. Crum	673 S.W.2d 735	142
1990	Elwell v. Stone	799 S.W.2d 46	123
2011	Age v. Age†	340 S.W.3d 88	55
2009	Daniels v. CDB BELL, LLC†	300 S.W.3d 204	45
1986	Poe v. Poe	711 S.W.2d 849	41
2008	M.E.C. v. Commonwealth, Cabinet for Health & Family Services†	254 S.W.3d 846	39
2009	Patmon v. Hobbs†	280 S.W.3d 589	37
1986	V.S. v. Commonwealth, Cabinet for Human Resources	706 S.W.2d 420	36
2014	Teague v. Commonwealth†	428 S.W.3d 630	35
1988	Howard v. Fountain	749 S.W.2d 690	33
1986	Nolin Production Credit Ass'n v. Canmer Deposit Bank	726 S.W.2d 693	32
2013	Pryor v. Colony Insurance†	414 S.W.3d 424	31
1986	Jackson v. Commonwealth	717 S.W.2d 511	30
1989	Whittington v. Whittington	766 S.W.2d 73	27
1988	First & Farmers Bank of Somerset, Inc. v. Henderson	763 S.W.2d 137	27

Showing the 15 most-cited of 140 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 Kentucky Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court is Denise Clayton on?: Denise Clayton is a Judge of the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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