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 1974 / Served to 1978

Gary Kent Nelson

Judge, Court of Appeals of Arizona

Gary Kent Nelson was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Arizona, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1935–2013
Tenure: 1974–1978 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1974	Court of Appeals of Arizona	–	–

Education

University of Arizona

Judicial Record

In our data, Nelson authored 122 published opinions for the court (1974–1989), plus 9 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Walker v. City of Scottsdale (73 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. 54 of these were attributed to Nelson 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
1989	Walker v. City of Scottsdale	786 P.2d 1057	73
1977	Sequoia Manufacturing Co. v. Halec Construction Co.	570 P.2d 782	53
1977	Fleitz v. Van Westrienen	560 P.2d 430	39
1976	Town of Paradise Valley v. Gulf Leisure Corp.	557 P.2d 532	36
1978	Scappatura v. Baptist Hospital of Phoenix	584 P.2d 1195	33
1977	Ray Korte Chevrolet v. Simmons	571 P.2d 699	27
1977	Rodriguez v. Besser Co.	565 P.2d 1315	27
1975	State Compensation Fund v. Industrial Commission	535 P.2d 623	26
1978	Walker v. Walthall	588 P.2d 863	24
1976	Hopper v. Industrial Commission· Dissent†	558 P.2d 927	23
1976	Morrell v. St. Luke's Medical Center	556 P.2d 334	22
1975	Brooks v. Industrial Commission	539 P.2d 199	21
1977	Ranger Insurance v. Lamppa	563 P.2d 923	19
1976	Cathemer v. Hunter	558 P.2d 975	19
1977	State v. Cook	564 P.2d 97	18

Showing the 15 most-cited of 134 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 Gary Kent Nelson on?: Gary Kent Nelson 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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4 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).