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 1965 / Served to 1981

Francis J. Donofrio

Judge, Court of Appeals of Arizona

Francis J. Donofrio was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Arizona, who joined the court in 1965. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1913–1983
Tenure: 1965–1981 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

University of Arizona

Judicial Record

In our data, Donofrio authored 446 published opinions for the court (1965–1981), plus 6 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Tiffany Incorporated v. WMK Transit Mix, Inc. (63 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. 162 of these were attributed to Donofrio 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
1972	Tiffany Incorporated v. WMK Transit Mix, Inc.	493 P.2d 1220	63
1979	Bender v. Bender	597 P.2d 993	50
1967	State v. Tellez	431 P.2d 691	40
1973	Royal Globe Insurance Co. v. Industrial Commission	513 P.2d 970	39
1968	State v. Van Meter	440 P.2d 58	39
1973	Walker v. Montgomery Ward & Company, Inc.	511 P.2d 699	37
1968	Shaw v. State	447 P.2d 262	37
1966	Patania v. Silverstone	415 P.2d 139	33
1965	First National Bank of Arizona v. Otis Elevator Co.	406 P.2d 430	33
1980	Flowers v. K-Mart Corp.	616 P.2d 955	32
1973	State v. Whittingham	504 P.2d 950	32
1967	Thunderbird Metallurgical Inc. v. Arizona Testing Laboratories	423 P.2d 124	31
1980	State v. Neese	616 P.2d 959	30
1967	Corbin v. Broadman	433 P.2d 289	30
1967	Chantler v. Wood	430 P.2d 713	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 454 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 was Francis J. Donofrio on?: Francis J. Donofrio was 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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16 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).