How do judges of the Louisiana Court of Appeal reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Louisiana Court of Appeal / Joined 1979 / Served to 1997

J Louis Watkins Jr.

Judge, Louisiana Court of Appeal

J Louis Watkins Jr. was a Judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1929–1997
Tenure: 1979–1997 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Louisiana Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Watkins authored 530 published opinions for the court (1980–1997), plus 11 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Jordan v. Honea (49 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. 366 of these were attributed to Watkins 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
1981	Jordan v. Honea	407 So. 2d 503	49
1988	DeGruy v. Pala, Inc.†	525 So. 2d 1124	46
1995	State v. Andrews	655 So. 2d 448	44
1993	State v. Williams	632 So. 2d 351	43
1985	State v. Hookfin	476 So. 2d 481	41
1993	State v. Gamberella	633 So. 2d 595	40
1990	O'NIELL v. Louisiana Power & Light Co.	558 So. 2d 1235	40
1994	State v. Trahan	637 So. 2d 694	37
1990	Spencer-Wallington, Inc. v. Service Merchandise	562 So. 2d 1060	37
1995	Pennington Const., Inc. v. RA Eagle Corp.	652 So. 2d 637	36
1985	State v. Brown	481 So. 2d 679	36
1994	Cheramie v. Horst	637 So. 2d 720	32
1994	Estate of Graham v. Levy	636 So. 2d 287	31
1993	Engolia v. Allain	625 So. 2d 723	30
1986	State v. Burge	486 So. 2d 855	29

Showing the 15 most-cited of 543 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 Louisiana Court of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was J Louis Watkins Jr. on?: J Louis Watkins Jr. was a Judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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