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 1975 / Served to 1992

Frank X. Gordon Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of Arizona

Frank X. Gordon Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona, who joined the court in 1975. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1929 · age 97
Tenure: 1975–1992 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1975	Supreme Court of Arizona	–	–

Education

Stanford University
University of Arizona

Judicial Record

In our data, Gordon authored 399 published opinions for the court (1962–1992), plus 20 dissents and 43 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Gretzler (374 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. 106 of these were attributed to Gordon 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
1983	State v. Gretzler· Concurrence†	659 P.2d 1	374
1989	State v. Guerra	778 P.2d 1185	341
1985	State v. Nash	694 P.2d 222	279
1984	State v. Barnett	691 P.2d 683	270
1989	State v. Valles	780 P.2d 1049	234
1989	State v. Carver	771 P.2d 1382	211
1983	State v. Adamson	665 P.2d 972	201
1984	State v. Fisher	686 P.2d 750	190
1991	State v. Lavers	814 P.2d 333	189
1980	State v. Clark· Dissent†	616 P.2d 888	189
1982	State Ex Rel. Collins v. SUPERIOR COURT, ETC.	644 P.2d 1266	181
1981	State v. Tison· Concurrence†	633 P.2d 335	175
1983	State v. McCall	677 P.2d 920	164
1987	Hawkins v. Allstate Insurance	733 P.2d 1073	163
1985	Calvert v. Farmers Ins. Co. of Arizona	697 P.2d 684	163

Showing the 15 most-cited of 462 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 Frank X. Gordon Jr. on?: Frank X. Gordon Jr. 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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16 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).