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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Arkansas / Joined 1949 / Served to 1987

George Rose Smith

Justice, Supreme Court of Arkansas

George Rose Smith was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas, who joined the court in 1949. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1911 · age 115
Tenure: 1949–1987 · 38 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1949	Supreme Court of Arkansas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 1,637 published opinions for the court (1956–1986), plus 85 dissents and 64 concurrences. Most cited: Hoban v. Hall (457 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. 1,284 of these were attributed to Smith 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
1958	Hoban v. Hall	316 S.W.2d 185	457
1980	Wicks v. State	606 S.W.2d 366	399
1977	Dixon v. State	545 S.W.2d 606	196
1968	Laman v. McCord	432 S.W.2d 753	151
1968	Parish v. Pitts· Concurrence†	429 S.W.2d 45	139
1966	Norton v. Nat. Bank of Commerce of Pine Bluff	398 S.W.2d 538	127
1984	Day v. Day	663 S.W.2d 719	100
1975	Degler v. State	517 S.W.2d 515	97
1984	CNA Insurance v. McGinnis	666 S.W.2d 689	89
1983	Rector v. State	659 S.W.2d 168	83
1965	Carr v. Turner	385 S.W.2d 656	78
1970	Wawak v. Stewart	449 S.W.2d 922	68
1986	Ricarte v. State	717 S.W.2d 488	67
1981	Cassell v. State	616 S.W.2d 485	67
1962	Walton v. Tull	356 S.W.2d 20	67

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,791 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 Arkansas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was George Rose Smith on?: George Rose Smith was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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38 years on the Supreme Court of Arkansas. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).