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

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Court of Appeals of Arizona / Joined 2003 / Active

Donn Kessler

Judge, Court of Appeals of Arizona

Donn Kessler is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Arizona, serving since 2003. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2003 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Court of Appeals of Arizona	–	–

Education

University of Virginia-Main Campus
Yale University

Judicial Record

In our data, Kessler authored 96 published opinions for the court (2003–2017), plus 7 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Dawson v. Withycombe (158 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. 58 of these were attributed to Kessler 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
2007	Dawson v. Withycombe	163 P.3d 1034	158
2011	State v. Flores	260 P.3d 309	110
2012	Ruben M. v. Arizona Department of Economic Security†	230 Ariz. 236	103
2012	Duckstein v. Wolf†	230 Ariz. 227	85
2007	Cullum v. Cullum	160 P.3d 231	80
2006	Charles I. Friedman, P.C. v. Microsoft Corp.	141 P.3d 824	55
2010	Simon v. MARICOPA MEDICAL CENTER	234 P.3d 623	54
2009	State v. Fish	213 P.3d 258	53
2009	Pullen v. Pullen	222 P.3d 909	50
2008	Yollin v. City of Glendale	191 P.3d 1040	45
2012	Walsh v. Walsh†	230 Ariz. 486	44
2009	Dowling v. Stapley	211 P.3d 1235	43
2007	Bohreer v. Erie Insurance Exchange	165 P.3d 186	42
2004	Robert Schalkenbach Foundation v. Lincoln Foundation, Inc.	91 P.3d 1019	41
2009	State v. Zamora	202 P.3d 528	39

Showing the 15 most-cited of 113 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 Court of Appeals of Arizona reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Donn Kessler on?: Donn Kessler is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Arizona.

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