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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Arkansas / Joined 1959 / Served to 1966

James Douglas Johnson

Justice, Supreme Court of Arkansas

James Douglas Johnson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas, who joined the court in 1959. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1924–2010
Tenure: 1959–1966 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1959	Supreme Court of Arkansas	–	–

Education

Samford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Johnson authored 505 published opinions for the court (1933–1966), plus 80 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: Glass v. Edens (79 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. 260 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
1961	Glass v. Edens	346 S.W.2d 685	79
1962	Safferstone v. Tucker· Dissent†	357 S.W.2d 3	73
1959	Andres v. First Ark. Development Finance Corp.· Dissent†	324 S.W.2d 97	58
1934	Burton v. Tribble	70 S.W.2d 503	58
1960	Hilger v. Harding College· Dissent†	331 S.W.2d 851	53
1962	Hooker v. Parkin	357 S.W.2d 534	46
1935	State Ex Rel. Attorney General v. Irby	81 S.W.2d 419	37
1964	Cude v. State· Dissent†	377 S.W.2d 816	36
1960	Ark. State Highway Comm. v. Bingham· Dissent†	333 S.W.2d 728	36
1965	Beaumont v. Faubus	394 S.W.2d 478	35
1934	Kirby v. Kirby	75 S.W.2d 817	35
1963	Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Ins. Co. v. Robinson	365 S.W.2d 454	34
1965	Ellis v. Ferguson	385 S.W.2d 154	33
1962	Southern Farmers Assn., Inc. v. Wyatt	353 S.W.2d 531	33
1962	Woodard v. Holliday	361 S.W.2d 744	29

Showing the 15 most-cited of 590 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 Arkansas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was James Douglas Johnson on?: James Douglas Johnson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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