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

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

Supreme Court of Arizona / Joined 1965 / Served to 1971

Ernest W. McFarland

Justice, Supreme Court of Arizona

Ernest W. McFarland was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona, who joined the court in 1965. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1894–1984
Tenure: 1965–1971 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1965	Supreme Court of Arizona	–	–

Education

University of Oklahoma-Norman Campus
Stanford University

Judicial Record

In our data, McFarland authored 303 published opinions for the court (1965–1977), plus 8 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: Malinski v. Industrial Commission (133 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. 69 of these were attributed to McFarland 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	Malinski v. Industrial Commission	439 P.2d 485	133
1969	Damron v. Sledge	460 P.2d 997	126
1970	State Ex Rel. Larson v. Farley	471 P.2d 731	125
1969	Massengill v. Yuma County	456 P.2d 376	121
1968	McKay v. Industrial Commission	438 P.2d 757	109
1970	Streenz v. Streenz· Dissent†	471 P.2d 282	105
1970	Porter v. Empire Fire and Marine Insurance Company	475 P.2d 258	101
1966	Nielson v. Flashberg	419 P.2d 514	100
1967	Sandoval v. Chenoweth	428 P.2d 98	84
1969	State v. Griswold· Dissent†	457 P.2d 331	75
1966	In Re the Estate of Milliman	415 P.2d 877	67
1966	Arizona Podiatry Ass'n v. Director of Insurance	422 P.2d 108	59
1970	State v. Shaw	471 P.2d 715	58
1970	E. L. Jones Construction Co. v. Noland	466 P.2d 740	58
1970	Bacchus v. Farmers Insurance Group Exchange	475 P.2d 264	52

Showing the 15 most-cited of 318 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 Arizona reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Ernest W. McFarland on?: Ernest W. McFarland was a Justice of the Supreme Court 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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5 years on the Supreme Court of Arizona. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).