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 1996 / Active

James Jay Caraway

Judge, Louisiana Court of Appeal

James Jay Caraway is a Judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal, serving since 1996. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1996 · 30 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1996	Louisiana Court of Appeal	–	–

Education

Louisiana Tech University

Judicial Record

In our data, Caraway authored 380 published opinions for the court (1996–2017), plus 48 dissents and 38 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Speed (196 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. 406 of these were attributed to Caraway 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
2009	State v. Speed	2 So. 3d 582	196
2015	State v. Allen†	162 So. 3d 519	66
2012	State v. Glover†	106 So. 3d 129	62
2011	State v. Young†	73 So. 3d 473	58
1996	Tennessee v. Campbell	682 So. 2d 1274	43
2011	State v. Moton†	73 So. 3d 503	38
1998	Wilson v. Wilson	714 So. 2d 35	33
2015	State v. Hebert†	181 So. 3d 795	32
2010	State v. Garner†	47 So. 3d 584	31
1997	Gardner Ex Rel. Gardner v. La. State Univ. Med. Center Shreveport	702 So. 2d 53	31
2006	Lewis v. State Farm Ins. Co.	946 So. 2d 708	29
2005	State ex rel. E.D.C.†	903 So. 2d 571	29
2005	State v. Shumaker	914 So. 2d 1156	27
2011	Dowdy v. City of Monroe†	78 So. 3d 791	26
2011	LeBlanc v. PYNES†	69 So. 3d 1273	26

Showing the 15 most-cited of 467 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 is James Jay Caraway on?: James Jay Caraway is a Judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal.

Sources

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

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30 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).