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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Kentucky / Joined 1979 / Served to 1986

J Calvin Aker

Justice, Supreme Court of Kentucky

J Calvin Aker was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1939–2000
Tenure: 1979–1986 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Supreme Court of Kentucky	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Aker authored 39 published opinions for the court (1979–1986), plus 10 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Ice v. Commonwealth (168 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. 36 of these were attributed to Aker 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
1984	Ice v. Commonwealth· Concurrence†	667 S.W.2d 671	168
1985	Gall v. Commonwealth	702 S.W.2d 37	150
1986	Carnes v. Carnes†	704 S.W.2d 205	72
1982	Breeding v. Massachusetts Indemnity & Life Insurance Co.	633 S.W.2d 717	57
1984	Polk v. Commonwealth	679 S.W.2d 231	42
1983	Payne v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	656 S.W.2d 719	41
1982	Conway v. Huff	644 S.W.2d 333	40
1981	Shumaker v. Paxton	613 S.W.2d 130	38
1982	Bingham v. Bingham	628 S.W.2d 628	30
1982	Largent v. Largent	643 S.W.2d 261	29
1979	Meade Construction Co. v. Mansfield Commercial Electric, Inc.	579 S.W.2d 105	29
1983	Hamilton v. Commonwealth· Dissent†	659 S.W.2d 201	28
1979	Sebastian v. Floyd	585 S.W.2d 381	28
1980	Blake v. Commonwealth	607 S.W.2d 422	19
1982	Hillman v. American Mutual Liability Insurance Co.	631 S.W.2d 848	18

Showing the 15 most-cited of 52 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 Kentucky reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was J Calvin Aker on?: J Calvin Aker was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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