How do judges of the Utah Court of Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Utah Court of Appeals / Joined 1993 / Active

James Z. Davis

Judge, Utah Court of Appeals

James Z. Davis is a Judge of the Utah Court of Appeals, serving since 1993. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1993 · 32 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1993	Utah Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Davis authored 461 published opinions for the court (1993–2015), plus 31 dissents and 36 concurrences. Most cited: State Ex Rel. E.R. (254 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. 499 of these were attributed to Davis 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
2001	State Ex Rel. E.R.†	21 P.3d 680	254
2000	Serrato v. Utah Transit Authority†	2000 UT App 299	83
2003	F.C. v. State†	81 P.3d 790	65
1998	State v. Bryant†	965 P.2d 539	56
1995	State v. Blubaugh†	904 P.2d 688	48
2000	Salt Lake City v. Ray†	998 P.2d 274	45
2002	E.B. v. State†	53 P.3d 963	44
1994	Trembly v. Mrs. Fields Cookies†	884 P.2d 1306	42
2006	State v. Alfatlawi†	2006 UT App 511	38
1999	U.P.C., Inc. v. R.O.A. General, Inc.†	1999 UT App 303	38
1997	State v. Hall	946 P.2d 712	37
2012	State v. Bair†	2012 UT App 106	36
2002	State v. Diaz· Concurrence†	2002 UT App 288	32
2005	State v. Wallace†	2005 UT App 434	30
2003	Covey v. Covey†	2003 UT App 380	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 529 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 Utah Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is James Z. Davis on?: James Z. Davis is a Judge of the Utah Court of Appeals.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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