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 1957 / Served to 1960

J Mercer Johnson

Justice, Supreme Court of Arizona

J Mercer Johnson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona, who joined the court in 1957. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1906 · age 120
Tenure: 1957–1960 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1957	Supreme Court of Arizona	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Johnson authored 69 published opinions for the court (1948–1960), plus 9 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Pulliam (81 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. 17 of these were attributed to Johnson 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
1960	State v. Pulliam	349 P.2d 781	81
1959	Zancanaro v. Cross	339 P.2d 746	67
1958	Dean v. Superior Court	324 P.2d 764	49
1960	State v. Holden	352 P.2d 705	48
1960	Slow Development Company v. Coulter	353 P.2d 890	42
1959	State v. Sorrell	333 P.2d 1081	42
1959	Figueroa v. Majors	338 P.2d 803	41
1958	Gray v. Woods	324 P.2d 220	41
1958	Cummings v. Lockwood	327 P.2d 1012	40
1957	State v. Wallace	319 P.2d 529	36
1960	Adams v. Bear	350 P.2d 751	34
1958	Bolin v. Superior Court	333 P.2d 295	34
1958	Knight v. Rice	321 P.2d 1037	34
1960	Young v. Bishop	353 P.2d 1017	31
1957	Eldridge v. Jagger	317 P.2d 942	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 81 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 J Mercer Johnson on?: J Mercer Johnson 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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2 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).